Donations: Commercial use of Free Software and Libre Art
Kickstarter for Game Dev
I'm sure you heard the amazing Kickstarter news ;) Dusted, author of Wizznic! shared a short thought about the news I'm actually talking about.
FOSS Games and Donations Now
The FLARE RPG project page now has a PayPal donation button.
0A.D. uses Pledgie for funding.
There is a list of FOSS projects that accept BitCoin here and a more general list here.
OGA and Kickstarter Thoughts
OpenGameArt founder and admin Bart K, shared that he is considering Kickstarter, but could use some more inspiration about what rewards could be given to high pledge-givers.
OGA/CC/FSF Game Dev Contest Plan
There's also a game dev contest in the works, which will be organized this summer by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation and OpenGameArt. The details are still getting ironed out.
Donations on Free Gamer
By the way: here on FreeGamer, we have Flattr widgets below the posts of the authors who provided their Flattr IDs and other donation methods are available on the about page.
So far no "Donations" page on our wiki, where setting up of PayPal, BitCoin, Flattr and other services is explained for open source game dev projects. There is a rather long thread on the topic of making money with free/FOSS games.
Any donation statistics from open source (game) projects and expertise on the subject are highly welcome in the comments!
Justin Nichol finished the Kickstarter-crowd-funded portrait marathon! The art has been uploaded here to OpenGameArt.
Back in December 2010, the project was funded with USD 2,567 (of at least USD 1,500) to make 30 portraits. Now all 30 portraits of the backers that sent him model photos have been finished.
The remaining five backers have been asked to get in contact with the artist. Best via Kickstarter.
Kickstarter will take a fee of USD 128.35 (5%).
Justin has a blog you can follow.
New fantasy portraits by Justin Nichol [more here]
Remember Justin Nichol's crowd-sourced fantasy portrait commission?
In a recent announcement the artists reports, that the collection of 35 portraits will be finished by February 2012, as they will be exhibited some day that month somewhere in California, USA.
First 'mobile devices' contest submission by Mumu
The current OpenGameArt challenge is 'mobile devices' and ends on Monday, December 5, 2011. The contest before that was low on participants and a survey was started to figure out how to get more people involved.
Becoming a WTactics character
Taken from OGA: WTactics is currently offering a chance to have your likeness on a WTactics card in order to raise funds for the continued development of thier project. From their website:
Give our artists a picture of you or your beloved one and become a part of the game! The artist will create a nice portrait with your chosen class, clothing and equipment, making it an everlasting part of our game and the open source communities, turning it into an immortal memory.
This reminds me of the Fantasy Portrait Kickstarter project, which produced some pretty portraits but unfortunately still istn't finished yet.
pzi's album cover
Pal Zoltan Illes of jClassicRPG fame released the game music album A Mantle Of Games under CC-BY-SA. Feel free to use and leave a comment here.
This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :)
FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing!
A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2:
If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY.
I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011:
Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got any libre art sharing news to spread? Let us know in the comments!
OpenGameArt 2 submission form
FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing!
FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash...
FreeSound Bulk License Change
I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011:
Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got any libre art sharing news to spread? Let us know in the comments!
The last version of Flare that Free Gamer took a look at was 0.11. The newest version is 0.14.
Title and savegame loading screens now exist, adding to immersion.
Character customization (gender, portrait and name) is now possible. (Note how much depth this part of starting a game can acchieve in some cases). The character portraits are a product of Justin Nichol's fantasy portrait marathon.
Joystick support, conversations, vendors, quests, a new area and many more smaller additions included. It is now possible to configure keybindings and resolution, which leds to my first 720p HD video of Flare gameplay:
Clint Bellanger, main developer of Flare, posted a reflection on game progress in Flare, which includes some simple but interesting statistics.
You can show Flare some pocket love via Flattr.
Character customization in Flare
Title and savegame loading screens now exist, adding to immersion.
Character customization (gender, portrait and name) is now possible. (Note how much depth this part of starting a game can acchieve in some cases). The character portraits are a product of Justin Nichol's fantasy portrait marathon.
Joystick support, conversations, vendors, quests, a new area and many more smaller additions included. It is now possible to configure keybindings and resolution, which leds to my first 720p HD video of Flare gameplay:
Clint Bellanger, main developer of Flare, posted a reflection on game progress in Flare, which includes some simple but interesting statistics.
You can show Flare some pocket love via Flattr.
The public domain audibook project LibriVox got hacked (not the first time it seems). There was no open announcement yet [edit: here's the blog post] but as a forum user I received an email:
I would like to appeal to the community to look out for each other and report strange activities like spam posts or random content deletion to site admins, pointing out this recent hacking. Everybody who had a LibriVox account and used their password elsewhere should change it ASAP, especially if moderative or administrative accounts are involved!
... Let me just add a little bit of positive open content news though: I was looking for car blinker sounds, contacted three Freesound contributors and got permission from all of them to re-distribute under CC0, which I did on OpenGameArt. j1987 even added a "all my sounds are public domain" note. :)
A hacker broke into the LibriVox forum and got access to our completedatabase including emails and encrypted passwords. We have locked them outof the system, and we’ve fixed the vandalism, but they still have ourdatabase.Well, I'm glad they are open about this. A great time to update the passwords I use to more secure ones. :)
In the interests of full disclosure, here is some extra information:(1) The database contained every piece of communications sent through theforum, including all private messages. This information is now in thepossession of the hacker.
(2) All forum passwords in the database are encrypted. However, if yourpassword was very simple, it will be trivial for the hacker to break theencryption using "brute-force" techniques. They will likely attempt exactlythis, so if you use the same password on any other Internet service, youshould immediately change your password at those services.
We are very sorry that this happened, and once this is sorted out as bestas it can be, we’ll be doing a more thorough security review.
I would like to appeal to the community to look out for each other and report strange activities like spam posts or random content deletion to site admins, pointing out this recent hacking. Everybody who had a LibriVox account and used their password elsewhere should change it ASAP, especially if moderative or administrative accounts are involved!
... Let me just add a little bit of positive open content news though: I was looking for car blinker sounds, contacted three Freesound contributors and got permission from all of them to re-distribute under CC0, which I did on OpenGameArt. j1987 even added a "all my sounds are public domain" note. :)
New Pages of Adventure graphics.
OpenGameArt is looking for a hosting sponsor. The target is a dedicated server with following min. specs:
- Quad core, 64 bit CPU
- 4GB RAM
- 500GB hard drive space
- 1TB monthly transfer
- 1 gigabit connection
- 64-bit CentOS, RedHat or Fedora
- Root access and Autonomy
I'm looking forward to the LGM this year. Bart, admin of OpenGameArt will talk about running libre graphics projects.
You can view previous year's talk videos here.
Version 3 of Blendswap is live! But the site has some server load problems.
OpenArt, Moosader's own take on game resource sharing has been updated and has content under CC0 and CC-BY v3 licenses. It received a visual update a while ago.
Remember Justin Nichol's CC Portraits Marathon? There's an update [kickstarter|justin's blog]!
I had an injury earlier in the year which kept me preoccupied, and then school started. The pace should be much quicker from this point on and I apologise for the delays. In any case, I have these 10 and about 23 others to complete (with 2 additional portraits of my choice to finish the 35 I guaranteed). I intend to complete the bulk over the next month and a half, and will try to post the fruits of my labor every Wednesday from this point forth, so if you don't see anything from me one wednesday, feel free to bug me.
- SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 released! [great changelog!]
- Former CubeCreate lead dev will now work on OctaForge (so far #octaforge chat is the only piece of infrastructure)
- Search and Rescue II has improved sound and uses OpenAL now
- jClassicRPG's developer wrote short-term goals for the project (also forum registration now works)
- Creative Commons licenses are now officially available in .txt format (for easy inclusion in Your Game Project)
- Adam Drew of Red Hat will webcast about Linux/Open Source music production April 20
- Steampunk MMO project Tempest in the Aether will have an OpenGameArt-featured art contest during Weekend of April 30th - a todo list will be released on April 20th
Squamulus in the forums has pointed us to the DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition, a competition for complete-ish open source games, wherein the winners get ported to their new all-encompassing content delivery/creation system WorldKi
Nominations started a week or so ago and so far they have 41 open source games nominated, which is quite a decent list in my opinion, you can view the full list here. Unfortunately, nominations close today (12pm CST) so this post might be a bit late if you want to nominate your own games..
Voting begins as soon as nominations close, so check back at their page if you want to be heard.
My thoughts on the competition:
It's definitely interesting to see another entry into the sparsely populated Open Source( Gluon[alpha], OpenCDS[dead], and to a lesser degree DJL[also dead]) /densely populated Proprietary (Steam, Desura, Impulse etc etc) game content delivery arena.
There's not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..
As for handing out porting as a prize? I'm not totally sure if that's the way to go about doing things, especially if no one has heard of the platform before. Mentioning the possible monetization through the platform might have made it a bit more appealing, but then again, such things also cause dispute.
OpenGameArt Weekly Competition
On another note, the OpenGameArt Friday Challenge got renamed to "Weekly Challenge" and still starts on Fridays but ends after ten days (Mondays) so on during the weekend there are two topics to contribute to. :) The challenge art submission count is now at 77 (17 new + 60 old).
The current theme is Public Treasure Hunt and involves scouting the web for public domain game resources and is due June 28th.
Nominations started a week or so ago and so far they have 41 open source games nominated, which is quite a decent list in my opinion, you can view the full list here. Unfortunately, nominations close today (12pm CST) so this post might be a bit late if you want to nominate your own games..
Voting begins as soon as nominations close, so check back at their page if you want to be heard.
My thoughts on the competition:
It's definitely interesting to see another entry into the sparsely populated Open Source( Gluon[alpha], OpenCDS[dead], and to a lesser degree DJL[also dead]) /densely populated Proprietary (Steam, Desura, Impulse etc etc) game content delivery arena.
There's not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..
As for handing out porting as a prize? I'm not totally sure if that's the way to go about doing things, especially if no one has heard of the platform before. Mentioning the possible monetization through the platform might have made it a bit more appealing, but then again, such things also cause dispute.
OpenGameArt Weekly Competition
On another note, the OpenGameArt Friday Challenge got renamed to "Weekly Challenge" and still starts on Fridays but ends after ten days (Mondays) so on during the weekend there are two topics to contribute to. :) The challenge art submission count is now at 77 (17 new + 60 old).
The current theme is Public Treasure Hunt and involves scouting the web for public domain game resources and is due June 28th.
Some of Dragon History's GPLv2-ed assets
You might remember this video-heavy post about Dragon History, a comical fantasy adventure game for ScummVM. I wanted to inform you that the game art, including music, graphics and text are all covered by the GPLv2. They can be downloaded here.The game is originally written in Czech and properly translated to the Polish language. If you have the necessary language skills and want to make the game accessible to a wider audience, it would be great if you could work on cleaning up the English translation. The contact information of the maintainer is on his homepage. If you want to turn this into a team project, feel free to use FreeGameDev's general forum for a thread.
Speaking of free assets: The current OpenGameArt friday challenge is "Near Future" and I have no idea what to.. hm.. cyberpunk?
To the six finished challenges, 50 pieces of game art have been submitted. It's quite fun to follow new art and picking the best pieces, so don't let the submission forms discourage you from joining in. ;)
Oh, and speaking of cyberpunk, the quite awesome soundtrack to the hacker game Endgame: Singularity has been uploaded in .ogg and source form to OGA. And the minimal-graphics single-player HTML5 turn-based strategy game Evil Cult has a great feel to it when you play it while listening to that (kind of) music.
PS: Silly me forgot to include my source of information for the art licensing of Dragon History. It's email communication with the project maintainer. :)
Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!
The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.
The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)
And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)
By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.
It feels good to post without embedding YT videos for a change. :)
youtube-dl: NPK4ZaWYkJU | tinyogg: EWuLa
SuperTux 3D is a 2½ years old idea that is now being turned into reality by using the 2D platformer SuperTux' style and assets and the Blender Game Engine (BGE).
I think the assets work well in 3D space, but of course controls and camera movement are unpleasant yet.
I think the assets work well in 3D space, but of course controls and camera movement are unpleasant yet.
Xdriller is a falling-cubes-style puzzle game with nice colorful visuals and happy music. I found the game on SF.net a while ago and recently got reminded of it when I saw this tux model on OG.
Speaking of Blender and asset sharing: Blendswap currently has a poll on what website feature to add next (right sidebar here) and I would like to encourage you all to vote for the 'licensing' option, as once clear licenses exist, it will be possible to determine what models can be used in fully free as in you-know-what games.
Speaking of Blender and asset sharing: Blendswap currently has a poll on what website feature to add next (right sidebar here) and I would like to encourage you all to vote for the 'licensing' option, as once clear licenses exist, it will be possible to determine what models can be used in fully free as in you-know-what games.
Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.
Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^
LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.
On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)
There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].
I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.
I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.
Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings
Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^
LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.
On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)
There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].
I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.
I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.
