Let's Play Permissions for Open Source Games With Free Art

Let's Play (LP) is an uprising form of previewing and experiencing video games.

While a review summarizes the experience, a LP allows to look a player over their shoulder and indirectly experience the game from one perspective in its entirety - if both Let's Player and viewer have the endurance.

LPs have many styles: non-commented, informational, humorous... And their production quality varies too, be it video, audio or presentation.

Example of a Let's Play video in its natural environment

Some creators of LPs ("LPers") earn money using YouTube's monetization features. When they do, YouTube's semi-automatic moderation process starts paying more attention to the videos' compliance with copyright.

Sometimes, LPers will contact game developers to receive permission to create LPs. To many creators of games, LPs are a welcome form of promotion and they will always say yes.

Clint Bellanger of FLARE released a Let's Play policy, which elegantly covers both the situation in which a game's art assets are CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed and where all copyright belongs to one person.

FLARE is a collaborative effort of many artists who agreed to release their art under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and I think that FLARE's LP policy reflects the intention of the license very well.

A complicated case might be a game which contains art that is under the GPL, which could be interpreted in a way, that requires the resulting video, as well as video project files to be made available under GPL as well.

In theory, any LP could be considered "fair use". However, for-profit use and use of large portions of a work are often considered as not being "fair use" - for example by YouTube.

For game designers, I consider LPs to be a valuable resource, allowing to look up features or part-experience gameplay, where acquiring, installing and playing the game would be impossible, due to time restrictions.

I recommend looking up games that you have fond memories of or which you always wanted to try but the installation effort was too high on lparchive.org or just YouTube's search function with "let's play" in the query.

If YouTube's HTML5 doesn't work for you, youtube-dl will allow you to circumvent flash player issues (monetized YouTube videos appear to require flash).

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WTactics Summer of Cards

WTactics is a beautiful, freely licensed card game which pleasantly surprises for example by having it's amazing assets under free licenses, not shying away from employing same-sex love themes and now, by inviting game designers to share an apartment in lovely Sweden on WTactics development during July 2013.

People all over the world are hereby welcomed to participate in Summer of Cards 2013 – the first ever real life gathering of the dev. team and all those of you that want to get aboard and contribute to the worlds first truly pro libre customizable card game, our dear WTactics. 1:st to 28:th of July 2013 is when this is going down in Malmö, Sweden, so do some reading in here and scribble us a mail already so we can start planning for wicked goodness. You come and stay as you may.

"A couchsurfing style gamejam" was approved as a possible description of the event.

Invitation to summer of cards 2013

Your host says hi!

Once this returns positive results, I will be hoping for the first free, open source monastery being found by 2015... :)

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Project Leadership & Management in Free, Open Source Games

Both 0 A.D. and Unknown Horizons experience a change in leadership!

For 0 A.D., Erik Johansson steps down from project leadership and Michael D. Hafer assumes that role.

In Unknown Horizons, Nightraven steps back and Kilian fills the project management role.

Leadership in free and open source game projects is an exciting topic with much opinion about which style will lead to a successful game - whatever the subject's definition of "success" is - and too few examples to make objective statements about it.

Are you following any specific projects and their leadership structures an want to comment on these? I must admit that I am out of the loop with many, many projects, although I am pretty sure that for example Flare, NAEV and Valyria Tear have (successful) Benevolent Dictator for Life style leadership.

On related note: FIFE (the isometric 2d engine used by Unknown Horizons) moved to GitHub.

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A tale of two Hexagons

This is a guest post by user Hythlodaeus, discussing open source clones, indie game community behavior and developer's apologies.

video: Open Hexagon - Official Release Trailer

Vee Software's Open Hexagon is a very, very recent game, but even in its short existence, it has already managed to stir up quite an amount of controversy, the matter being that Open Hexagon is none other than a free software clone of the popular iOS/Android game Super Hexagon, created by the equally popular indie developer Terry Cavanagh.

Now, video game clones are not a negative or uncommon thing at all, and have pretty much existed since the beginnings of video game history. However, Open Hexagon developer, Vee, has recently found himself the victim of some serious flak, the reason behind this being that he decided to release his own game clone before the much anticipated PC/Steam version of Super Hexagon. This resulted in a legion of rabid Cavanagh fans rushing in to accuse Vee of being a thief, a liar, and quite a variety of other unpleasant names and insults.

To make a few things clear, Open Hexagon is not only 100% free software, programmed from scratch using C++ and SFML (unlike Super Hexagon which is primarily based in Adobe Flash, with the PC port being completely redone in C++ as well), as it is also available for absolutely zero cost. It is not geared as a competitor for Super Hexagon, and it's certainly not trying to profit from its original concept at all. If anything it's actually attracting more attention towards the original game. If that wasn't enough, the developer actually took the time and decency to ask permission to Cavanagh himself to create his game, while he had no obligation to do so at all.

image: tweets between devs

What ensued was a deep and long-winded apology from Vee, to all Super Hexagon fans, and the subsequent approval of his game by Cavanagh, despite the fact that he was never against the idea, since day one. I guess all's well that ends well, but even though Cavanagh's reactions were fairly reasonable from his part, I still can't stop thinking that issues like this could have been easily avoided altogether, had he, and other indie developers such as him, made habit of releasing the source code of their own games, something that has, in fact, been done successfully in the past with surprisingly positive results.

Call me crazy, but I find it troubling that this new, so-called generation of “indie” developers and their supporters, heralded as the avant-guarde of video game originality, and as a counter-cultural movement that opposes industry stereotypes and its negative practices, shows so little knowledge and sensibility on matters of software freedom, and how it can be used to help and empower other amateur / independent developers such as themselves. The result is the accidental propagation, to their followers, of the gross misconception that for some reason, game concepts are the exclusive property of their authors, and that copying and innovating over other people's ideas is a wrong thing to do. Coincidently, Vee himself has shown some great eloquence on this matter in his written apology, which really makes me wonder how come there aren't more people like him in this new indie circle:

As a independent game developer, I wanted to create my own tribute version of the game, not only as an experiment, but also as a completely new experience: I wanted to make the game fully open, both as a free open-source product, and also as a customizable and scriptable game, in order to let people share their creations and have fun.

Now, the game itself is quite simple. You are a triangle spinning around a hexagon. Incoming polygons want you dead, so you have to dodge them. Sounds easy enough, right? It turns out it isn't. And it could be a lot more if you're whiling to help, because unlike Cavanagh, Vee crafted his game thinking of customization and the freedom to easily script, paint and construct your own levels in any way you wish.

image: Open Hexagon ad

Version 1.3 is out now, with updates pouring in, on a nearly daily basis, as Vee is still trying to shape his game into a more unique experience, a process in which you can take part as well! So if you have a mind for quick-reaction puzzle games and enjoy crafting your own personal conundrums for later enjoyment, or even showing them to your friends, by all means, download Open Hexagon, play it, and share your own levels with others!

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Aliens vs Business Suits

Time remaining to vote

SourceForge.net has "Project of the month" to promote communities supporting their favorite projects.

December 2012: UFO:AI battles against JStock in the poll for "Project of the month". It's a close race.

You know what you have to do.

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