1. The submission stands alone. We recommend that people also submit their art to OGA so that they'll have ownership of it under their own accounts. Any art that's not submitted to OGA by the author will be submitted by me or one of the other contest admins. This won't affect your score either way. :)
2. If you want to put a preview in the text area and don't want to host it yourself, just submit the file along with the rest of your submission and link to it in the description.
3. The description and notes section will be read by judges, so there's no need to include a readme text if you'd prefer not to.
This is actually kind of a difficult topic. While there are plenty of people who are very quick to (rightly) point out that there's nothing stopping you from selling a FOSS game, it's worth noting that it's going to be a lot harder to make a profit if you're giving away the same thing that you're selling. The real answer, unfortunately, is to not give away quite everything.
There are a couple of ways you could do this:
Start out propietary and open source later. This seems to be the most common. If you release your game for free too early, though, you might risk angering your customers, unless you warn them ahead of time that it'll be open source fairly soon (that said, if you do that, you could lose out on some sales).
Keep the art proprietary. This is effective, but as someone who runs an art site for FOSS games, it's not the option that I would personally prefer. A lot of games that start out proprietary and eventually go FOSS (like the above) do this as well.
Keep the engine proprietary. You can always open up your art and media and keep your game engine proprietary. The down side here is that it's not really open source or free software. :)
Keep the 'glue' code proprietary. There aren't that many projects that do this, but I'd like to see it done. Sell your whole game, and also put the engine source code and the art files up for free download, but sell the 'script' code. Here, you have the advantage of creating buzz by encouraing people to make free 'fan' levels for your game, but you're still charging people for the full experience.
Kickstarter. If you want to release your game completely and immediately as open source, you're going to take a big sales hit, so you'd pretty much need to make all of your money on the Kikstarter campaign (probably $100k+), which is somewhat unrealistic for an unproven company. I'd love to see this work, but I doubt it's viable.
With all the thinking I've done on this subject, I'm pretty sure those are the only viable options I've come up with. The holy grail would be to get people to pay for a game that's compeltely free and open, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. :)
I've flagged this as having a license issue because we need clarification on something. OGA doesn't accept any "non-commercial" type licenses; that is, you can't require that people use your song in non-commercial works only.
It's fine to request that people only use your song in non-commercial works, provided you make it clear that the request isn't part of the actual license or otherwise legally binding.
You can use these sprites and you're welcome to sell the game if you do. The license (CC-BY) only requires that you credit the authors and include a link back to OGA in your credits. You don't have to pay any royalties. :)
This is by no means required, but if you happen to have a website for this game, would you be willing to link it in the description? I like seeing the projects where people use art from OGA. :)
1. The submission stands alone. We recommend that people also submit their art to OGA so that they'll have ownership of it under their own accounts. Any art that's not submitted to OGA by the author will be submitted by me or one of the other contest admins. This won't affect your score either way. :)
2. If you want to put a preview in the text area and don't want to host it yourself, just submit the file along with the rest of your submission and link to it in the description.
3. The description and notes section will be read by judges, so there's no need to include a readme text if you'd prefer not to.
4. Yes. :)
Is the BSOD really a copyright issue?
I ask because xscreensaver has been part of most Linux distros forever, and it's got that fake BSOD screensaver that has exactly the same stuff.
Greets!
This is actually kind of a difficult topic. While there are plenty of people who are very quick to (rightly) point out that there's nothing stopping you from selling a FOSS game, it's worth noting that it's going to be a lot harder to make a profit if you're giving away the same thing that you're selling. The real answer, unfortunately, is to not give away quite everything.
There are a couple of ways you could do this:
With all the thinking I've done on this subject, I'm pretty sure those are the only viable options I've come up with. The holy grail would be to get people to pay for a game that's compeltely free and open, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. :)
Bart
Go here:
http://www.gimp.org/
Then download GIMP and save the individual layers.
Probably Inkscape:
http://inkscape.org/
Tiled is meant to be a tile map editor, not an editor of actual tiles. Use a drawing program for that. :)
Thanks! :)
Nice work :)
I've flagged this as having a license issue because we need clarification on something. OGA doesn't accept any "non-commercial" type licenses; that is, you can't require that people use your song in non-commercial works only.
It's fine to request that people only use your song in non-commercial works, provided you make it clear that the request isn't part of the actual license or otherwise legally binding.
Thanks!
Bart
@Guillermo
You can use these sprites and you're welcome to sell the game if you do. The license (CC-BY) only requires that you credit the authors and include a link back to OGA in your credits. You don't have to pay any royalties. :)
Greets!
This is by no means required, but if you happen to have a website for this game, would you be willing to link it in the description? I like seeing the projects where people use art from OGA. :)
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