Rules

Entry Requirements

Anyone may enter either or both phases of the contest.  Entrants may be either single individuals or teams.  If you enter as a team, you must name all of your participants when you enter.  Individal submissions and team submissions will be judged separately and have their own prize pots.

Art Phase

Rules:

  • Start date: June 1st, 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time
  • End Date: June 30th, 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time
  • License: Your art must be available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GNU GPL 3.0.  You may license your art under any additional license(s) that you choose.
  • Format: Your art must be released in an open, freely usable format that is well documented, readable by common software, and unencumbered by patent restrictions.  For images, we recommend PNG, and for audio, we recommend WAV for short sound effects and FLAC or OGG for longer samples such as background music.
  • Judging: Contest entries will be judged based on the criteria listed below.  Please note that the final ranking is ultimately a subjective decision by the judges.

Judging Criteria:

  • Consistency with style:  Art entries will be expected to be artistically consistent with the existing art released for the contest.  The style guide is not a set of hard and fast rules, but is intended to provide direction to help produce art that is consistent with the Liberated Pixel Cup art style.
  • Quality and skill:  Entries will be judged on their general quality and how appealing they are.
  • Quantity:  Entries will also be judged based on how much art is contained in the entry.  Largers submissions will be rated proportionally higher than smaller ones.
  • Submission format:  Entries that are made easy to modify (by providing multiple layers, if applicable) will be weighted more heavily than those that are not.
  • Judge's opinion:  In addition to the objective criteria, judges will also judge based on how much they like a particular entry.

Coding Phase

Rules:

  • Start: July 1st, 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time
  • End: July 31st, 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time
  • License:  Code entries must be free and open source, and must be available under the GNU GPL 3.0.  You may optionally release the code under any additional license(s) that you choose.
  • Source code:  You must provide the complete source code for your entry.  Any code you have written for your game prior to the beginning of the contest must be made available at the beginning of the contest.
  • Platform:  Your code must be able to be compiled and run on a 100% free-as-in-freedom platform.  It may not make use of any proprietary libraries or VMs.  Just to be clear, we cannot accept games that will ONLY run on one of the following:  Flash, Silverlight, XNA, Unity, Windows, MacOS (or OSX), iOS, proprietary JVMs, or similar.  It is perfectly acceptable if your game runs on any of these platforms, but it must also work on an open platform (we strongly recommend making sure that your program run on modern flavors of GNU/Linux, as all of the judges will have access to it).
  • Framework:  You may use an existing engine or framework, or build your game from scratch.

Judging Criteria:

  • Consistency of style:  Your game should primarily make use of the art either provided for or entered into the contest.  You may add additional art if needed, but all original art included in the game must be available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GNU GPL 3.0 (existing art from other sources may be under any free-as-in-freedom license).
  • Ease of use:  Your game should be easy to compile and run.  You won't be disqualified automatically if a judge is unable to run your game, but it will count against you.  You are advised to avoid having large numbers of obscure dependencies or requiring bleeding edge (unstable) libraries.
  • Creativity:  Games will be judged on how creatively they use the artwork.
  • Judge's opinion:  How much the judges like your game.