Liberated Pixel Cup Art Contest Launches

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Liberated Pixel Cup Art Contest Launches

Posted by timothy on Friday June 1, 2012 @05:16PM from the take-heart-take-part-take-money dept.

Liberated Pixel Cup is an ambitious project backed by the FSF, Creative Commons, the Mozilla Foundation, and OpenGameArt to "program a bunch of free software games"; before the programming can get properly underway, though, they're looking for art that the game logic can manipulate, and they're using a contest to organize collecting it. Now, writes new submitter paroneayea, "Liberated Pixel Cup has announced that the art contest phase has just started. Several other bits have been announced as part of the post, including prize amounts, and a style guide, asset directory, and interactive demo section. Let the liberated pixeling commence!"

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First post by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-01 17:20 · Score: 1

Can I be the first one to say "WTF?"
I know there is a big selection bias involved in being an artist, where a lack of realistic expectations is kind of a given, but seriously... I can't even read this summary it's so optimistically cavalier about the scale of the task described my eyes just glaze over. Doing difficult things without purpose isn't art. It's just foolish.
1. Re:First post by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-01 17:31 · Score: 1
  
  That's the spirit!
2. Re:First post by tqk · 2012-06-01 17:58 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I know there is a big selection bias involved in being an artist, where a lack of realistic expectations is kind of a given, but seriously... I can't even read this summary it's so optimistically cavalier about the scale of the task described my eyes just glaze over. Doing difficult things without purpose isn't art.
  When I hung around the "Fine Arts" class in high school, I used an acetylene torch to cut up scrap into shapes I could then weld together into fanciful animal or plant shapes. I'd guess about fifteen girlfriends wound up with my creations gracing their front lawns. Art? They thought so. Years later, they were still out on their lawns, so their families agreed? Me, I just thought it was either fun or interesting to do.
  Then I got into pottery in the "Arts & Crafts" class, and THAT impressed me. Shimpo wheels, building kilns with fire bricks, all the interesting chemicals that go into glazes, Raku and reduction methods (suck the O2 out of silver oxide and you've got silver!).
  Too bad there's no money in it. I loved it.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
3. Re:First post by tqk · 2012-06-01 18:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Continuing the thought (sorry):
  
  Then I got into pottery in the "Arts & Crafts" class, and THAT impressed me.
  But is that "Art?" Good pottery well done *can* be art. Usually, it's utilitarian/useful (hence "Crafts"). Japanese pottery (ie. Raku) is fantastic stuff. There's whole civilizations, about which we only know of their pottery. Mere mortals can take mud and turn it into rock that lasts longer than their civilization, to be found by later civilizations' archaeologists.
  For a mere craft, it can be pretty seductive. Art? What's art?
  Meh. Depends how you do it. I think Mona Lisa is overrated. I've seen pottery that damned near glowed with life in the right light. There are glazes that were once used regularly that have been lost and we cannot replicate today.
  Sorry for the segue. This's dear to me.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
4. Re:First post by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-01 23:16 · Score: 1
  
  What's art?
  Who gives a shit?
  Man, this philosophy thing is kind cool.
5. Re:First post by tqk · 2012-06-02 11:18 · Score: 1
  
  What's art?
  Who gives a shit?
  Man, this philosophy thing is kind cool.
  You have no idea how cool it can be. It can really wake up your mind, to the point you scare yourself with the stuff you imagine. All from inside your own head!
  I like Aristotle, and King Lionides. And Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard and F. A. Hayek and and and ...
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
6. Re:First post by tqk · 2012-06-02 11:25 · Score: 1
  
  Thx mon. Keep on livin on.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
Think I've seen someting like this before by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-01 17:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

Similar to the TIGSource Assemblee Competition. I think I might actually enter this one, though. It really is a fantastic idea for artistically-deficient programmers like myself who otherwise wouldn't be able to create something at a passable level.
Note that despite the emphasis on art in the description, this phase refers to the creation of music and sound effects as well as graphics.
1. Re:Think I've seen someting like this before by exploder · 2012-06-02 02:26 · Score: 1
  
  Note that despite the emphasis on art in the description, this phase refers to the creation of music and sound effects as well as graphics.
  Music and sound effects are not art?
  
  --
  Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
For the love of it? by Frosty+Piss · 2012-06-01 18:21 · Score: 1

Probably not.
Quality game design is extremely complex and takes a lot of "man-hours" to arrive at something playable. Those with the skills to do it generally want to be paid...

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1. Re:For the love of it? by geekd · 2012-06-01 18:32 · Score: 1
  
  For the love of it YES.
  I just finished my first HTML5 game. Runestone Defense. I already posted it here, so I won't spam the link again. But I wrote it for the love of it. I won't make any money. If I wanted to make money I'd have made a flash game and gone for sponsorship, and Kongregate.com and all of that.
  I spend 4 weeks making that game, several hours a day, after work. Everyone has a hobby. Some people make model trains. Some people drink. I make games (and drink). I also spend hours and hours a week playing bass in a rock band. I don't make any money off that, either.
2. Re:For the love of it? by Frosty+Piss · 2012-06-01 19:02 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, it's a "cute" game, and I might play it *a few times*, but not too much more than that. It's a game that will get added to the MILLIONS of other games that people might pay .99 cents for and play a few times - before losing interest and finding some other little time consumer. Games like yours are like Solitaire and Minesweeper and such...
  
  --
  If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
3. Re:For the love of it? by geekd · 2012-06-01 19:09 · Score: 1
  
  And that's bad, why?
  I don't believe the point of The Liberated Pixel Cup is to come out with the open source Diablo III or Ghost Recon.
  Casual games seem to be the focus of the topic at hand....
4. Re:For the love of it? by wrook · 2012-06-01 19:30 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  My god. How many times have I seen that same sentence over and over and over again. Compilers are extremely complex and take a lot of man-hours to be able to use. Those with the skill to do it generally want to get paid. Then, I think it was spreadsheets. Ummm... After that it was an OS kernel. And then I think WYSIWYG word processor.... Web sever, web browser, 3D modelling software, etc, etc, etc.
  It's not just games. Software is complex. It takes a lot of man-hours to do. Currently, we have culture where some people write free software. Quite a few of those people get paid to do it now too. It's great! For a long time software has been ahead of the game in terms of "free culture" (by which I mean the products of creative effort that are freely distributable, not necessarily free of charge). Slowly other areas have been catching up.
  Games have historically been difficult to create in a free software project because while there were plenty of programmers around, artists and musicians have been lacking. Game designers have actually been plentiful, but they have been stuck in the modding scene (and often doing incredibly creative work) rather than in new development. This is slowly changing.
  The one place where free software game development really needs to improve is in realistic business models. I don't actually know of any full games (rather than engines) built on a free software model that are profitable. With business software, you can charge for support, but with games you can't. I would like to see someone try to do it, possibly using merchandizing, serialization and sponsored development (i.e., Chapter 2 brought to you be Coca Cola). It would take good marketing skills, which is lacking the most in free software development. Mozilla makes $100 million a year and they don't do support. I don't think it's a stretch to think that a decent game could do as well.
5. Re:For the love of it? by flimflammer · 2012-06-01 22:41 · Score: 1
  
  I'm still trying to figure out why your point is even relevant. What do you think this contest is supposed to be for, to make the next world class MMO or something?
6. Re:For the love of it? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-06-02 00:15 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Probably not.
  Quality game design is extremely complex and takes a lot of "man-hours" to arrive at something playable. Those with the skills to do it generally want to be paid...
  Same could be said for any software.
  In case you haven't noticed, the world is full of wonderful free software written by people with skill, and surely it took a lot of "man-hours".
  I'm actually quite surprise why it hasn't been done by now; FSF would've backed it up in the past as well.
7. Re:For the love of it? by Johann+Lau · 2012-06-02 03:18 · Score: 1
  
  ORLY. So if you turn Minesweeper or Solitaire into a failed abortion of a movie that takes 20 hours to sit through, that's "doing the job right"? Heh.
8. Re:For the love of it? by Korin43 · 2012-06-02 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  The one place where free software game development really needs to improve is in realistic business models. I don't actually know of any full games (rather than engines) built on a free software model that are profitable. With business software, you can charge for support, but with games you can't.
  It's entirely possible to open source games while still selling them. The trick is that you only make the source available to people who buy the game. The GPL is even set up to handle this -- it only requires you to make source code available to anyone you distribute binaries to. Several Humble Indie Bundle games have done this and it hasn't seemed to hurt them (especially since people have ended up helping them port those same games).
  I think the big problem is the phrase "free software", which (to normal people) means "software you give away for free", when what free software advocates really care about is "software you can use without being permanently tied to the author".
9. Re:For the love of it? by Johann+Lau · 2012-06-02 05:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Nah, you dumb fuck. You're projecting.
  
  Games like yours are like Solitaire and Minesweeper and such...
  
  And that's bad, why? [..] Casual games seem to be the focus of the topic at hand....
  
  Because, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Stuff like this and your game is simply a waste of space and unnecessary clutter.
  The orginal poster said "but it's just casual, not good enough". The point wasn't "it's mediocre for a casual game" (so what? it's fine for 4 weeks of hobby time, wtf is wrong with people, I'm tempted to say "show me YOUR games then before we continue the conversation"), but "it's a casual game period".
  If you want to make a separate point how mediocre games add clutter, do that. But don't just dive in arguing for something the OP didn't even say, and then talk about non-sequiturs.
  Now to your shitty "point".
  What "clutter" does a hobbyist game add? Do you have some kind of library in your head of everything anyone ever made or said? If you cannot navigate around things you don't like, blame yourself, but don't try to stifle others doing something they like in their free time. Critics like you are like the comic book guy in the Simpsons, you can't do shit other than moan, and you can fuck right off. I smell your impotence.
  The point of the poster was, he couldn't have made it without free graphics, and is grateful they exist because hey, it's fun to make a little game -- doing this or working in your garage, who the fuck cares. You're basically saying someone who painted their car should have instead let an artist do it, or simply leave it as it is, because that's just "clutter". Nobody asked you to play the game, nobody claimed it's the shit, surely not the author. So WTF? Just remove your eyes and ears, that will cut the clutter right out at the source. You're welcome, too.
  Also, put your money where your mouth is. If you imperfect games piss your petty, pitiful self off so much, offer constructive criticism. I guess you're too fucking stupid to even do that. Gamers. Gah.
10. Re:For the love of it? by Jesus_666 · 2012-06-02 05:39 · Score: 1
  
  I always thought that the obvious approach for commercial open source games would be to make the executable freely available but to assert your copyright on the other assets. Of course that doesn't work if the assets are also open-sourced, in which case I think a prefunded model (cf. Kickstarter, Desura Alpha Funding) would be the most plausible approach.
  
  Of course you always have to ensure that you actually are allowed to sell the assets you use. While the GPL doesn't prohibit commercial use, CC-BY-NC does.
  
  --
  USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
11. Re:For the love of it? by dgatwood · 2012-06-02 07:07 · Score: 1
  
  My god. How many times have I seen that same sentence over and over and over again. Compilers are extremely complex and take a lot of man-hours to be able to use. Those with the skill to do it generally want to get paid. Then, I think it was spreadsheets. Ummm... After that it was an OS kernel. And then I think WYSIWYG word processor.... Web sever, web browser, 3D modelling software, etc, etc, etc.
  Yeah, and unsurprisingly, the vast majority of people who work on those things—even in the free software world—are getting paid to do it. Apart from possibly the first couple of years of GCC, most of the development on GCC, Clang, LLVM, etc. has been done by developers working for companies that use and distribute those compilers. The company gets the advantage of a well-designed piece of software that they can use and can make available to their customers, and in exchange, they pay people to work to improve it in whatever ways those companies need. The open source 3D software, Blender, was an in-house commercial tool that eventually got released as open source after a failed attempt to release it commercially. The open source office suites stemmed from a project by Sun, who needed an office suite for their platform because presumably Microsoft wasn't willing to port theirs.
  The open source OS kernel... well, most of those have been open source since the dawn of computing, so that's a pretty silly one to even mention. UNIX, AFAIK, has never truly been closed source (so long as your institution bought a source license, anyway). That's why UC Berkeley was able to vastly enhance UNIX and eventually release their own distribution that became the modern BSD. You could even buy a source license for OpenVMS. So ignoring Windows and classic Mac OS (<=9), you have to go back several decades to find a major OS in which a licensed user could not gain access to the source (though sometimes for a price).
  The few exceptions have mostly been university projects. Apache was originally derived from NCSA httpd, a project by UIUC. It has since been rewritten, in part by corporate-paid developers, though I would not attempt to guess how much of that project's work has been done by paid developers. Also, at its most basic level, a web server isn't an insanely complex piece of software to write (though it tends to become that way through decades of accretion). I wrote a web server in an afternoon using shell scripts. Mind you, it isn't nearly as capable as Apache, but it does support CGI (Perl, PHP, etc.). It took me more than twice as long to write a solitaire game (including creating the ASCII art), and as graphical games go, that's about as basic as they come.
  Corporate sponsorship of development doesn't work nearly as well for games. Games do not contribute in a utilitarian fashion to the functioning of any company except perhaps a game company, and even then, only to the extent that they can sell it. Therefore, the number of corporations that are likely to pay someone to work on an open source game is pretty close to zero, and if you ignore Google, exactly zero. This is what makes open source games so few and far between. The only model in which it could realistically occur is one in which a company is already designing a game engine and is creating an open source game to get real-world testing of the engine before they release the actual game, and even then, that would require that the company actually care about shipping a product with a low bug count on day one, which as far as I can tell, no software company still does.
  This pretty much leaves university students creating open source games, which is why they are few and far between. And unlike web servers, 3D modeling tools, office suites, and OS kernels, you can't really get by with only one or two games in the world that lots of people contribute to.
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
12. Re:For the love of it? by KDR_11k · 2012-06-02 20:33 · Score: 1
  
  A lovely collection of baseless prejudices you have there. I'll just point at sites like this one as a counter point. Piles upon piles of assets for videogames, all free. Yeah, not all good but that's life.
  
  --
  Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
13. Re:For the love of it? by KDR_11k · 2012-06-02 20:43 · Score: 1
  
  Even if you get enough volunteers together you have the problem that commercial games are produced with a strict hierarchy where a small number of people are in charge of deciding what the game will be like and hundreds of people working to make what the designers ask for. With volunteers you can't have such a rigid structure or people will just get annoyed and leave (why contribute to a project if you're just a cog in the wheels?).
  Games also don't have as strict of a definition for what's the right thing to do, with applications you can usually say that feature X is a good thing and should be added but with games adding features that are good by themselves can be bad and someone has to decide what to include and what to drop.
  I've seen some good work with content packs for engines that are developed by different teams (e.g. Spring RTS "mods") but most content packs are made by very small teams to maintain coherence. The engine as a whole is a fairly utilitarian thing so it can support more developers but the content packs, the concrete games, don't work too well when too many people get involved because of all the disagreement and friction.
  
  --
  Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This Is Awesome by geekd · 2012-06-01 18:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm a programmer. I love games. I just finished my first HTML5 game: http://magigames.org/runestone_defense.html I used some OpenGameArt.org art in there, even.
I am SO looking forward to entering this contest as a programmer. Solo - HTML5. Oh yeah.
I wonder about the library rules. I used Jawsjs http://jawsjs.com/ in my last game, and it is open source, but I was looking at ImpactJS, (NOT open source) for my next game.
Anyway, more open art for people like me to use = good stuff in my book. Look for my entry when the programming phase opens.
1. Re:This Is Awesome by tbird81 · 2012-06-01 20:10 · Score: 2
  
  I've just looked up at the clock! I've spent 1.5hours playing your game!!!
2. Re:This Is Awesome by jones_supa · 2012-06-01 20:45 · Score: 1
  
  Quite good game.
3. Re:This Is Awesome by AlXtreme · 2012-06-01 23:28 · Score: 1
  
  Neat addictive game!
  
  --
  This sig is intentionally left blank
4. Re:This Is Awesome by KDR_11k · 2012-06-02 20:45 · Score: 1
  
  Art is something practical but ideas are a dime a dozen, everybody has too many of them and nobody needs somebody else's.
  
  --
  Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
CLI BSD-GAMES Welcome :-) by nemesisfixx · 2012-06-01 18:54 · Score: 1

I wish someone embarks on enhancing awesome classic console epics like hack, greed, etc Am not a heavy games player, but once in a while when plugged into a remote ssh session on a cloud, I open a session of a cli bsd-game to kill "darkspace" stress :-)
Re:OpenGameArt by geekd · 2012-06-01 19:03 · Score: 1

It is somewhat frustrating. But, as a programmer, I'm so happy to have a central open art repository, I'll deal with it. :)
Sprite editor by Hatta · 2012-06-02 00:45 · Score: 2

Is there a good sprite editor for Linux? Or do people just zoom way in with Gimp and use a 1x1 pen tool?

--
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
1. Re:Sprite editor by tepples · 2012-06-02 02:15 · Score: 2
  
  Or do people just zoom way in with Gimp and use a 1x1 pen tool?
  That's one way to do it, and that's how I've done it in my own NES homebrew games, along with a tool written in Python to convert PNGs into the NES's tile image format. You can set the grid size to 8x8, which gives you a size reference and makes certain copy and paste operations easier.
Re:Freedom! by Nushio · 2012-06-02 03:14 · Score: 1

Just because the sprites are RPG style doesn't mean you have to write an RPG. You could easily make a TCG (I'm working on one), or a Shmup featuring dragons instead of ships and killing villagers, or a Tactical RPG, or a bomberman-like game.
Point is that the sprites are useful for a lot of genres, you just have to be creative.

--
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Re:Runestone Defense by TaoPhoenix · 2012-06-02 07:04 · Score: 1

I'll third the Neat Game comment!
The first x levels are easy. The first hard one is the one with the racing skeletons.

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Re:Runestone Defense by geekd · 2012-06-02 07:40 · Score: 1

Thanks to you and everyone else for your kind (and even the not-so-kind) words. Lots of people are playing the game today. I've been a Slashdot reader since 1999, so I guess I should not be surprised the affect even a link in the comments can have on traffic.
The racing skeleton level is one of my favorites. :)
Re:OpenGameArt by hendrikboom · 2012-06-02 13:16 · Score: 1

What's OGA? I googled, but there were too many of them.
Re:Runestone Defense by TaoPhoenix · 2012-06-03 15:36 · Score: 1

Heh X hours later, I did manage to beat it! (I won't say how, in case other gamers out there want to still try it.)
But having spent a nice weekend getting through nearly all the game, what is your opinion on a level index? I wouldn't want to go through the whole level set just to try out one level!
And in fact that level turned out to be the hardest one of all for me. It stumped me all last night! For the rest, a few good patterns seemed to work, and I only lost he 2nd to last level by what feels like a lack of finesse - by that time I began to lose interest.
I found the arrows useless by the way - the power curve feels wrong because they're too weak on lower levels and it takes too long to get to level 5. Then one good wave of legionaries and you're sunk. Same with the bomb - cute idea, but it seemed rather slow and expensive to both build and operate.

--
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine