Announcing the Liberated Pixel Cup!
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 08:54
OpenGameArt.org is very proud to announce that we are collaborating with the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons to bring you the Liberated Pixel Cup, a two month long summer contest about creating a consistent set of art and then making awesome games with it!
As you might imagine, this is big news for OGA -- there's no better way for us to further our mission of bringing artists and developers together to make awesome free and open source games than having the opportunity to work together with the CC and the FSF towards making that happen!
So, what are you waiting for? Go, check out the site, and join us on IRC at #liberatedpixelcup on irc.freenode.net (click here to chat from your browser)!
Comments
Awesome collab!
+ 100 to it :P
You are awesome.:)
Niiiice! I can totally see myself participating in this.
Have you considered eventually spreading the word on pixel art oriented sites like Pixel Joint and the Pixelation forums? Most of the artists in those communities aren't exactly hard-core open-source enthusiasts in my experience, but you say competition with possible $$ prizes and you have their attention. :P
That's a good idea. I'll have to check out their policies first because I want to be sure I don't get labeled as a spammer. :)
This news made it to slashdot. What a cool idea.
It nice to see that some of the really recognized FOSS organisation start to take an interest in FOSS gaming and that OGA is part of it!
However (and that is rather nitpicking): I feel the overall theme, e.g. top down SNES style RPG grapics are a really boring and overdone topic. If fact I think there are already quite a few almost complete sets available under FOSS licenses.
Besides that... the game contest will probably result in a bunch of half finished prototypes, never to be looked at again after the competition.
What I would have really liked to see would have been a support drive of a big existing FOSS game project, but with focus on reusability of the art assets created. That way an existing and actively developed game would have been supported and we would also get an nice set of new FOSS artwork.
As a quick example: a libre set of graphics and a contest to create a new storyline and mods etc for http://www.vcmi.eu/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/fheroes2/ HOMM like game engines would have been a much more worthwile contribution to FOSS gaming.
Maybe it is not too late to switch to something like that as an alternative option? After all the graphics requirements would be similar and you seem to have not completely decided on the exact requirements.
<i>Maybe it is not too late to switch to something like that as an alternative option? After all the graphics requirements would be similar and you seem to have not completely decided on the exact requirements.</i>
We're not going to be switching at this point. :)
That being said, you're more than welcome to use the assets with existing code and enter them into the competition.
Guess I wasn't that far off with my speculation ;)
I think the hardest part of this won't be the art or the coding, but come up with an enjoyable type of game. Within the art/theme limitation I can only think of RPG or Strategy type of games, I don't think the "top down SNS style RPG graphics" should be a limitation, seeing how some games with "limited" graphics are quite popular (minecraft/dwarf fortress).
Ahh well... never mind then. The already done graphics are for sure nice and having a bunch of extension to them all with the same style is probably great. I can totally see the reasoning behind this type of contest... just the actual topic could have been choosen more wisely in my opinion.
Maybe next time we can focus more on supporting an actual game ;)
I'll be honest with you -- I think your expectations are needlessly low. If there's ever been a FOSS game contest that's had even close to this much publicity, I'm not aware of it. :)
Also, there are plenty of free-as-in-freedom engines that people can build on top of, so it's not like they have to start from scratch. If you work quickly, you can accomplish a lot in a month, and it would be cool to see some new projects come about because of this (or some old ones improved).
People who see this art and can only think of "RPG" are underestimating things!
Examples:
Additionally, we might not need to make "medieval" art to follow the spec? E.g. can I submit an office/cubicle tile set?
You could even make shooter in which you fly around over a town of NPCs and shoot at them, if you want to subvert the genre completely. :)
The art does admittedly suggest a general fantasy RPG genre, but we wanted to do something where we knew we could provide a fairly complete set of assets, and that meant concentrating in one direction. While I would certainly like to see some JRPG-type entries, nobody will be penalized for not going with that genre.
Furthermore, people can add on to the art in whatever genre they want, provided they stick with the general artistic style. If you'd like to go sci-fi or modern or post-apoc or whatever, that's all good.
Hmm, I have another comment/idea: Maybe it would be cool if one of the requirements would be a 2D normal-map? I know this sounds crazy at first glance, but you can make really cool stuff with lightning like shown with this 2D engine: http://www.asantee.net/ethanon/ . And in general, OpenGL ES supporting 2D engines are becoming rather the norm then the exception AFAIK.
Edit: it's a rather easy process too as explained here: http://www.asantee.net/ethanon/normalmap_tutorial/creating_normalmaps.pdf
That would certainly be a bonus if someone did it, but we won't be making any changes apart from clarifications and minor adjustments (nothing substantive at this point, since people have already donated a fair amount of money).
Hmm... however it would make really only sense if all assets had a normalmap... and it's easy to do: http://www.asantee.net/ethanon/normalmap_tutorial/creating_normalmaps.pdf
Besides, on the webpage it still says that the exact requirements are still to be made/not published... thus I see no problem in including a 2D normalmap as a requirement.
Damn, I wish this had been around two years ago.
Hey, I'm off from school in August. I don't suppose you could extend the coding deadline to August 31?
Had some thoughts about an idea. How about a town/survival/defence game against zombies/monsters. During daytime you have to manage a town (instruct town folks to gather resources and build defenses) to prepate for a monster/zombie attack during the night. The game will go on as long as you are alive, but how many resources can you gather during the day to defense your town?
That's a pretty cool concept. :)
Yeah, that does sound cool. I also had to laugh about Clint's anti-RPG. Sounds like that would be fun.
Why it's 2 months long?
That's too much time..
No it isn't.
That sounds quite similar to this game I think:
http://projectzomboid.com/
Edit: this was a reply to the zombie game idea that was posted earlier by Myckel.
Congrats, Bart - Level up!
Thanks! :)
@Julius, indeed it looks like that a lot, thanks for the tip.
Just count me in when starting, I hope making sole graphics will be enough to participate, and I hope I'll find enough mana to actually do something valuable :)
I have one single doubt, unrelated to the cup deal:
What could that be? is anything really robust out of beta? In case of JRPG-alikes the situation is most probably better than with any other genre, but still, I'm looking for those plentiful, out of beta, dev-ready - that is with toolchains and docs in place - tiling engines, and all I've been able to find is old Hamster Republic stuff that I'm afraid to turn on in the first place.
And as for the genres and ideas, there are really many options (and what can't be done, really?), and I'd rather leave game designers alone - those are creative persons. Month to code a good game (that is using an engine - if there is any ready that matches creator's idea) is a bit short. I'm pretty much sure, like with 7DRL, we will be left with a pile of code that was left barely working, unfinished, unmaintained, low quality (or PC speaking - showing signs of being created in a narrow time frame) and finally abandoned. On the other hand, I'll be happy with any playable outcome of this event, and even more happy with anything that will be maintained afterwards.
> What could that be? is anything really robust out of beta?
I'll be doing highlights on the LPC site blog in the near future (actually done one already). The Frogatto engine, which it's not specifically geared toward JRPGs, is versatile enough to handle the genre. I'll be going over others as well.
Realistically, I don't think there's going to be anything JRPG-specific that's as usable and polished as, say, the RPG Maker series, so there may be a little more programming involved.
Hi Mickel,
This concept is a casual game:
http://www.die2nite.com/?lang=en#index
BTW, I just noticed a typo in the Liberated Pixel Cup faq: "We wet with this genre because there's a fair amount of demand for it...".
I think "wet" should be "went"?
I totally meant to type 'wet' there, just to see if you guys were on your toes. :)
Kidding, obviously. It's fixed. Thanks for the heads up. :)