Dev Corner: Crowdfunding, OpenGameArt and Kickstarter

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!

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Crowd-Funded Open Source RPG Portraits Set DONE!

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.

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Crowd-Sourced Portraits ETA: February 2012!

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.

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OGA challenge: Mobile, Become WTactics a Character, Illes' Game Music Album

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.

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On OpenGameArt 2 and FreeSound 2

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. :)

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...

A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2:

FreeSound Bulk License Change

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:

Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site

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!

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Flare 0.14 Characters, Quests and HD video

The last version of Flare that Free Gamer took a look at was 0.11. The newest version is 0.14.

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:

Watch this video in 720p HD here

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.

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BlendSwap Hacked

Time to swap... passwords

Oh my. Two weeks ago Librivox. Now Blendswap. Read the story here. See their twitter for live updates.

Remember to use strong !P4$$w0rd5%_.

Hm, OpenGameArt appears to be down, so it can't be hacked right now at least. :)

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LibriVox Hacked

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:

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.
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.

Well, I'm glad they are open about this. A great time to update the passwords I use to more secure ones. :)

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. :)

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Let pixel maps do the talking

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

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Libre Graphics Meeting 10-13 May 2011, Blendswap v3, OpenArt

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.

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CC Fantasy Portrait Marathon Update!

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.

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STK 0.7.1, CC to OF, SaRII 2.2.0,jCRPG, CC TXT, OSM and TitA

1. SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 released! [great changelog!]
2. Former CubeCreate lead dev will now work on OctaForge (so far #octaforge chat is the only piece of infrastructure)
3. Search and Rescue II has improved sound and uses OpenAL now
4. jClassicRPG's developer wrote short-term goals for the project (also forum registration now works)
5. Creative Commons licenses are now officially available in .txt format (for easy inclusion in Your Game Project)
6. Adam Drew of Red Hat will webcast about Linux/Open Source music production April 20
7. 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

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SDL job offer, open art funding opportunities, tiny java/Slick game competition...

SDL-makers Galaxy Gameworks are looking for a talented developer who would be interested in developing and maintaining SDL.

Pfunked might support artists starting their own funding campaigns for creating art for FLARE, as he did with Justin's. Here are some asset ideas.

Then there's the option to offer high-quality art for being 'funded into free' at OpenGameArt. The current target is $130 for this dwarf warrior.

I wish there were (more) open source projects at 8bitfunding, Kickstarter, Fundry and IndieGoGo. The only open source game dev projects I found are a flash game (successful), FAR Colony and an interactive fiction engine iphone port (successful). I'm sure not only full game projects could make use of these fundraising services but free content creators as well.

Slick contest - art by danc

Then there's a game competition by the Slick java game engine. Check the image above for rules and prizes.

That's about all I can find and think of right now. Got anything to add? :)

PS: do you use flattr? Then share your data for great justice! If you're not using it yet but are sharing content on the web, then start using it already! :D

PPS: Wesnoth is still offering $200 for a swamp sound loop.

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FAR Colony Funding & Kambi Engine Donations (Is it possible to make money with open source games?)

The "Is it possible to make money" thread was revived recently. And then two projects I follow announced new funding-'features':

FAR Colony (First Autonomous Remote Colony) is "a game of exploration and space colonization being held in the 23th century". An 8 bit funding page was created [announcement] for it recently. The target is $800 in 109 days. A note at the bottom says:

Of course this project will continue to progress even if my goals aren't reached, it will be more slowly and limited without but will stay alive !

This makes me wonder: how to motivate donations towards open source games (besides making a good game ;) ).

Kambi (VRML) Engine has introduced a fundry.com page for project pledges, feature pledges and donations [announcement]. Fundry.com looks interesting and like an easy way to play the 'donation game', a concept I talked about long ago. Fundry currently accepts paypal only.

The only other open source game project to use fundry.com is the Construct SDK. Fundry has no API yet and writes "Contact us to let us know how you would use it." I think perhaps a Trac integration should be neat..

On a related note: sound specialists can earn $200 on this swamp sound task for Wesnoth.

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Happy Aðfangadagskvöld!

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ):

Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress

OGA's presents

There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example.

Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared.

Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

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Portrait Marathon got $1500, could use $1500 more :)

The fantasy portrait marathon reached first base. I just wanted to let you know. Remember, that if it reaches $3000 ($9000!!!/3), we will get a massive instructional video!

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Fantasy Portrait Marathon Update and Reddit Game Jam #4 in a few hours!

Justin added new possible targets to his freely-licensed fantasy portraits project for OSARE and OGA:

$1500

by December 28th

30 portraits

$2000

by December 28th

35 portraits

$3000

by December 28th

35 portraits + a full length instructional video showing the painting process for the collection

I sure hope we can arrange this gift of Justin's video to ourselves..
You can spread the word on fsdaily and reddit.

In other news: there's a 48h game jam STARTING TODAY! Here's the IRC channel, here are the rules. I recommend github and love2d!

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Freely Licensed Fantasy Portraits Financing!

The style

Open-art artist Justin Nichol intends to create 30 freely licensed portraits (or more) in the style you see above. I support his Fantasy Portrait Marathon for 3 purposes:

1. Allow an open source enthusiast artist to continue his studies
2. Provide portraits for  the excellent slash-and-hack OSARE
3. Add a quality set of art to OpenGameArt for use in various games

The cash

$1500, Dec 28

The target

Targeted is a backing of $1500 until end of 2010. At time of posting, $580 (38.6%) have been already pledged (7 backers).

The artist

Other works by Justin

Justin Nichol is attending the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, Ca. He contributed art to PARPG and OGA. He has a portfolio.

The portraits

• GIMP will be used for drawing the portraits
• Backers will be able to determine the faces they pay for (check the right sidebar of the project page for details)
• The portraits will be CC-BY-SA/GPL dual-licensed for maximum copyleft compatibility

I can only say: invest in this one! And spread the word too, for example on reddit.

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A little bit of everything

Long time no see!
Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet. That is all ;).

Games

CONS

CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog. I know I do.

Xenowar

Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet.

skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar.

Contests

SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec)

Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [Rules]

Assets

OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more and more topics. Hopefully one day they (the forums) will have a better usable design :) (this probably depends mostly on Drupal and Drupal extensions).

BlendSwap on the other hand is not getting that much attention as I imagined it would after finally introducing free licenses.

UFO:AI license statistics

UFO:AI wants to legalize it! They seek freely-licensed textures and images to replace their "license unknown" files. And they have statistics and graphs! Also their latest news cover changes to their level editor in screenshot form.

Engines

Burster is bringing Blender into the browser. Not stable.

jMonkeyEngine's team is working towards a visual SDK. They recently released alpha 3.

The developer 2D LWJGL engine Slick is making first Steps of porting to Android. Meanwhile the developer of Android platformer Replica Island blogs about development for that platform.

SDL Multi-touch, gestures and android port are some features added during Google Summer of Code. [source]

PixelLight [videos] is a new, LGPL3-licensed 3D engine on the block.

• In development since 2002 (released in August 2010)
• Runs on Windows and Linux, a prototype for mobile devices exists
• The free libraries ODE (physics) and OpenAL (sound) are supported

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DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition

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.

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