Thanks for posting this Stefan. I am one of the people behind the campaign. We could really use the support of free gaming and free culture communities. Just backing at the ten dollar level, if enough people get behind it could allow us to do some really amazing, high quality stuff.

Clint Bellanger wrote a better description of why we're passionate about this sort of thing on his blog, so just follow the link above in Stefans post.

If you want free game assets and free games in general, pitch in. For the price of a ticket to a movie you could have a collection of Freely Licensed monsters, and if we reach certain stretch goals, dozens of creature designs from other genres. Additionally we have an exclusive book, a deck of a cards, and maybe most importantly tutorials to help other people make more Free Monsters.

Hello!  I must say, this project is very interesting, and the designs you all have shown off so far look great.

As a pixel artist the designs would be the bit that I would be able to work with (though the CC-By-SA licensing means that generally I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed a few times around here).  So when it comes to the 3D side of things I'm just a somewhat uninformed spectator, albeit one who is hopeful that they might make development easier for games I like.

So, if you'll pardon my 3D ignorance, I have a couple of questions on that front (which others in my general situation might as well).

1) What does it mean logistically for the models to be unskinned and unrigged?  From my basic understanding this would seem to indicate that they still wouldn't be game-ready for most applications, but would require a fair amount of extra work to animate.  But I know I could be very wrong on that.

2) What sort of polycount are the models aimed to have?  I know that's not an issue for a game like FLARE which would render them as sprites, but it could of course be very important for a truly 3D game.

Hey Redshrike,

Not sure about qualms with the BY SA license, aside from the fact that it is viral. We do have a stretch goal planned which would make them CC By instead, but thats off on the horizon for now.

1) Logistically it means that if you have need of textures of rigs you will have to make them yourself. I am a die-hard free culture advocate, not just someone trying to make a buck, so even after the campaign I will continue to improve the models and designs in my spare time. But the modeler I have hired is a professional and quite busy. We wanted to offer a wide collection, and we have stretch goals planned to add textures and rigs, but we didn't want to have our campaign goal be the thirty grand that would be required to do a large collection of fully textured and rigged models. We want to add textures and rigs but we need support to do it.

2) The polycount will be fairly low, the image shown is the high poly sculpt which will be baked onto a normal map on a low poly mesh. So the polycounts will be quite manageable.

p.s. Clint showed me the Goblin you did, it was great, and I really enjoyed it.

Re -SA: I don't mind the virality and I really like copyleft as a concept.  There are, however, some disagreements as to what exactly is a derivative work that has to be released under the same license, and what that means for using them in tandem with dissimilarly licensed assets.

Re: rigging: fair enough.  I'm not involved enough to know the going rate for models, though I can definitely appreciate why they aren't cheap.

Re: poly-count: great to hear :)  I'm sure that will make some devs quite happy.

Also, thanks, though really it was you and Clint who did the heavy lifting; I just polished it.  I really like that goblin design.