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Liberated Pixel Cup Art Contest Launches

Posted by timothy on 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!"

2 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. This Is Awesome by geekd · · 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.

  2. Re:For the love of it? by wrook · · 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.