It's disappointing to me though. When I started releasing art under CC-BY-SA I thought that my art used in games would be like GPL code. Instead, because art is treated as modular, it's more like LGPL.
If there were a CC license for games that operated more like GPL I'd release all my future art under that instead.
Assume all artists have their own pet projects/interests.
When you have a free game project, attracting and keeping artists is almost impossible. You have to somehow convince them to ignore their own awesome projects/interests and give their precious time to yours.
How to convince them?
1. Have a core, active crew.
A game project with one core artist and one core programmer is already farther than most projects ever get. It helps if these core people are good friends who came up with the idea for the game together. The core crew has to consider the project their own baby. New artists who want to help can take directions from the core artist (same with core/new programmers).
2. Communicate
Tweet, blog, forums. The core crew needs to talk about everything, out in the open. If your site looks like it hasn't been updated in three months, people assume your project is dead.
3. Money
It's hard to get professional quality art without professional quality pay. I pay artists when I need a fresh perspective on my project, or to fill gaps I can't cover as a core artist.
4. Demo
You might attract volunteer artists later once your project had a solid early beta and the core gameplay wows audiences. Until then, pay bounties to get the core pieces complete. Pull together one hero, one creature, one tileset, one level, one background song. Invest time in a level editor. Now other artists can come to your world and create their own stories, levels, etc.
5. Be Awesome
If your game idea and execution is lame, you won't even attract players (much less artists).
6. Know your limits
A lot of game projects seem doomed before they start because their scope is far too large. An MMO takes 50-200 people working 3-6 years. A simple puzzle or arcade game could take 1 person 6-12 months.
FaiB = "Free as in Beer". Zero cost to the consumer.
FaiF = "Free as in Freedom". Doesn't refer to cost, but to freedoms/liberty given to the consumer. Also called "FaiS" = "Free as in Speech".
---
Art is proprietary by default. An artist has to make efforts to learn about copyright law, individual freedoms, and open source licenses to choose to create FaiF art.
Copyright law is very technical and left-brain. Compare to art which is creative and right-brain, and art culture that says "great artists steal".
Most people just want to make money from their art. They don't think to themselves "proprietary licenses is the only way to accomplish this". They don't think that far. They probably don't even know their art is copyrighted the moment they create it. They post work to deviantArt, or FaiB games to websites, hoping to get noticed and find paying work from it.
It's hard to recruit people to make open source art. It takes education and convincing. One method that's worked great for me: I pay artist actual, real money for commission work and request they release the art under a CC-BY-SA license. That doesn't take much convincing: they get paid, AND (after some explaining) they feel good about their art being used by the community.
A glance at DeviantArt shows that people don't know much about copyright and creative commons. Many works are tagged with an icon that says "You don't have permission to use this!", even though the copyright note on every page clearly means the same thing. Other works say "Feel free to reuse this, just give me credit!" but the submitter did not choose CC-BY which would accomplish the same thing.
Taverns are popular and an easy choice. Note that someone using it in a game would have to build a whole village of matching building styles. Depending on how detailed/technical you want to get, it may be better to build a stand-alone style building.
I think a monastery or adventurer's lodge overlooking a cliff would be rad.
I don't have big plans. The next thing I was gonna do was before eaten/after eaten set: apple and apple core, banana and posable peel, and fish then fish-head and bones.
There's an endless amount of food that can be created, so feel free to jump in. If we get duplicates of a certain food that's a good thing.
I tested a full sprite sheet with Gauss vs. Mitch vs. CatRom and Catmull-Rom definitely works best for the output I need. Thanks for the tip! I updated my Skeleton uploads here with the new versions.
Lattice's analysis seems to be the accepted view.
It's disappointing to me though. When I started releasing art under CC-BY-SA I thought that my art used in games would be like GPL code. Instead, because art is treated as modular, it's more like LGPL.
If there were a CC license for games that operated more like GPL I'd release all my future art under that instead.
Assume all artists have their own pet projects/interests.
When you have a free game project, attracting and keeping artists is almost impossible. You have to somehow convince them to ignore their own awesome projects/interests and give their precious time to yours.
How to convince them?
1. Have a core, active crew.
A game project with one core artist and one core programmer is already farther than most projects ever get. It helps if these core people are good friends who came up with the idea for the game together. The core crew has to consider the project their own baby. New artists who want to help can take directions from the core artist (same with core/new programmers).
2. Communicate
Tweet, blog, forums. The core crew needs to talk about everything, out in the open. If your site looks like it hasn't been updated in three months, people assume your project is dead.
3. Money
It's hard to get professional quality art without professional quality pay. I pay artists when I need a fresh perspective on my project, or to fill gaps I can't cover as a core artist.
4. Demo
You might attract volunteer artists later once your project had a solid early beta and the core gameplay wows audiences. Until then, pay bounties to get the core pieces complete. Pull together one hero, one creature, one tileset, one level, one background song. Invest time in a level editor. Now other artists can come to your world and create their own stories, levels, etc.
5. Be Awesome
If your game idea and execution is lame, you won't even attract players (much less artists).
6. Know your limits
A lot of game projects seem doomed before they start because their scope is far too large. An MMO takes 50-200 people working 3-6 years. A simple puzzle or arcade game could take 1 person 6-12 months.
First a note for the uninitiated:
FaiB = "Free as in Beer". Zero cost to the consumer.
FaiF = "Free as in Freedom". Doesn't refer to cost, but to freedoms/liberty given to the consumer. Also called "FaiS" = "Free as in Speech".
---
Art is proprietary by default. An artist has to make efforts to learn about copyright law, individual freedoms, and open source licenses to choose to create FaiF art.
Copyright law is very technical and left-brain. Compare to art which is creative and right-brain, and art culture that says "great artists steal".
Most people just want to make money from their art. They don't think to themselves "proprietary licenses is the only way to accomplish this". They don't think that far. They probably don't even know their art is copyrighted the moment they create it. They post work to deviantArt, or FaiB games to websites, hoping to get noticed and find paying work from it.
It's hard to recruit people to make open source art. It takes education and convincing. One method that's worked great for me: I pay artist actual, real money for commission work and request they release the art under a CC-BY-SA license. That doesn't take much convincing: they get paid, AND (after some explaining) they feel good about their art being used by the community.
A glance at DeviantArt shows that people don't know much about copyright and creative commons. Many works are tagged with an icon that says "You don't have permission to use this!", even though the copyright note on every page clearly means the same thing. Other works say "Feel free to reuse this, just give me credit!" but the submitter did not choose CC-BY which would accomplish the same thing.
I like these. Simple, effective geometry.
I like the steel material here. Did you create it?
Technically this is good for numbers up to 999,999,999 right?
http://clintbellanger.net/rpg/
Added a small amount of style to my project's website. Still no name or logo.
Any medieval building would be fantastic.
Taverns are popular and an easy choice. Note that someone using it in a game would have to build a whole village of matching building styles. Depending on how detailed/technical you want to get, it may be better to build a stand-alone style building.
I think a monastery or adventurer's lodge overlooking a cliff would be rad.
I don't have big plans. The next thing I was gonna do was before eaten/after eaten set: apple and apple core, banana and posable peel, and fish then fish-head and bones.
There's an endless amount of food that can be created, so feel free to jump in. If we get duplicates of a certain food that's a good thing.
I tested a full sprite sheet with Gauss vs. Mitch vs. CatRom and Catmull-Rom definitely works best for the output I need. Thanks for the tip! I updated my Skeleton uploads here with the new versions.
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