We are thrilled today to announce that Mozilla is joining Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt as a sponsor of Liberated Pixel Cup!  Mozilla has been a longtime leader in the development of free software and has recently been doing plenty of great things to push forward free software HTML5 gaming, including recent work on BrowserQuest and their new game engine Gladius.

Our artists have been working really hard over the past couple of weeks to expand the LPC art style.  Here are some of our latest mockups:

In response to a thread over at freegamedev, we've made some major changes over the past couple of days to how texture browsing works.  We've unpacked all of the texture archives on OGA and made the textures individually browse-able by category.  A big thank you goes out to the folks who have been helping manually categorize the nearly 4,000 texture files in the arcnive. :)

The second entry in our series of engine and tool highlights is the amazing, general-purpose tile map editor, Tiled.  First released as a Java program back in 2004, Tiled has undergone some major revisions (including a full rewrite) and is now a stable and mature C++/Qt application boasting contributions from over 40 different developers.  Tiled is quite capable of handling any type of tile map you throw at it, including top-down, side view, or isometric.  And don't worry about having to load your map into another editor to add game-specific details -

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we've added several often-requested new features over the course of the last week.  These include:

• Download counts for files.
• Social networking links (not just on blog entries -- check the art pages too!)
• More RSS feeds, including per-user art feeds.
• A helpful submission guidelines link conveniently located at the top of the art submission page. ;)

Enjoy. :)

Over the next few weeks I'll be highlighting some tooklits and game engines that people should consider making use of in the code portion of the Liberated Pixel Cup.  To kick things off, I'd like to draw your attention to the Frogatto engine, which powers the beautifully rendered Frogatto & Friends.

So there are a couple of misconceptions about the LPC rules that seem to be along a common theme, and I'd like to clear them up.

Misconception #1: Your game must only run on a 100% free-as-in-freedom platform, and may not run on a proprietary platform.

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!

FOSS steampunk MMORPG Tempest in the Aether is celebrating their first release with an art contest!  They're looking for both 2D and 3D art matching their distinctive style, so if you think you've got what it takes, head on over to their contest page and take a look!  They'll be giving away some significant cash prizes.

P.S.  Stay tuned for OGA's big announcement later this morning. :)

Now that we've got a funding page set up with the FSF, it's time to go official with the contest.  We've actually been working on this for the past several months, building up a body of art to serve as the base theme for the contest.  Since everyone (including yours truly) likes to look at pretty screenshots, I'll show you what we've got so far: