While looking for a homeschool project for my son [and me], I found Stencyl. All's well so far in that department, and maybe I'll finally even follow my idols in indie horror. Either way, I plan to throw a few pixel art animations into the pile.

The Stencyl community seems to rely on OGA. StencylForge is either almost unsearchable or I'm doing something very wrong when I'm hunting for tilesets, and attribution there is a mess, and there are no links to artists' portfolios or sites. So just in general, thanks for being you.

Here come the newbie questions.

There are a lot of free resources for innumerable file formats, so why can't search engines search by the license type? I know it's unrealistic to expect that right now, but this is about more than deliberate theft and video games. All the resource databases I've seen are just a wreck compared to what they could be, and that hinders artists and hobbyists of all kinds from accessing resources that they themselves often intend to share. It's like pre-dictionary spelling; if you haven't seen a popular version of what you want, you have to make it yourself [even if it already exists in ten recolors and reformats].

I don't know much about programming or web indexing, but I'm hoping to learn a little, so can someone tell me why the dream must die? Do too few file formats support text comments, or are those unreadable or unusuable for the purposes of identifying collaborators and licenses [and potentially sites]?

I'm guessing that won't work, as no one has done it yet, so... if finished works on any level included attribution per resource with a standard format, the credits could practically compile themselves [if it were coded for various languages and included in programs like Stencyl], right? On the asset production side, this means typing out a couple lines of text, and I don't imagine the strain on developers and programmers being that bad, since more available resources is a good thing for everyone...

It's a pipe dream, but it still seems to follow the progression from individual, proprietary resources to standardized open resources. Right now I imagine game creation resources to be similar to the pre-MIDI electronic sound scene, and I just can't see that holding up to the test of time.