Hi. I don't have enough spare cycles at the moment to come up with my own writing, but if you're willing to rewrite the relevant sections (with the changed bits in bold so that I can revirew them), I'll take a look and try to merge the changes into the FAQ.
Problems are everywhere . try to be honest and respectful to one's own work and that of others . Sorry about the link below. I do not know how to remove it .
@Snabisch: What link are you talking about? I'm not seeing any.
So, a quick note, because we've had issues with this in the past:
OGA will always respect the wishes of artists who want to have their art taken down. However, people need to be aware that those licenses are, in fact, irrevocable, and we cannot and will not assist anyone trying to revoke a license. Furthermore, records of removed art are retained offline in case there's ever a question of whether they were posted. Eventually, we'll be making those records viewable (without the downloads available) so that people can check them on their own. In the rare case where an artist "takes there ball and goes home" and removes all text and previews from their submissions before requesting to have them taken down (this has happened more than once), we willl revert those submissions to the last "good faith" posting before putting up the deletion record.
Regardless of the license on a work, we don't accept art that's obviously not intended to be distributed as game art. We had an individual who cut commercial game art out of a CC-BY-SA screenshot from an indie game and post it here. While that is legal to do, it's incredibly disrespectful of the artist, and we won't archive it here. Likewise, if an artist is selling their own freely-licensed art, OGA isn't going to undermine them by distributing it for free. Note that this is all site policy and not a legal requirement. This is a bannable offense, although we generally issue warnings first, at our discretion.
If an artist doesn't own a piece of art in the first place, they don't have a right to put their own license on it, and the license was never valid. If that's the case, people still need to remove that work from their projects. In the near future, I'm going to add a notification system to let registered users know if art that they have downloaded has been flagged with a licensing issue.
I don't get the impression that anyone here has any misconceptions abouot this stuff, but for people wandering through and seeing this thread, I want to make sure that common misconceptions are cleared up.
Just wanted to say that I'm actually completely on board with archiving submissions with their respective license files; it's just something that will take a big effort to implement and will likely be bug prone for a while, so it's something I can't really touch until I have more time.
Consider this edge case: Someone submits a bunch of art with one license, and a week later, they go back and remove that license and add a different one. There are two ways this could be handled, and both are ugly:
Keep uncompressed copies of every file on the site, along with the compressed ones. This would increase space usage by a good 50% or so, and space is already at a premium.
Uncompress the archive file into a temp directory, remove the license file, add a new license file, and then recompress the archive, which is time-consuming and kind of complicated.
There's also the matter of "I submitted this zip file, so why can't you just put the license in that file, rather than zipping up the license and my zip file inside another zip file?" I mean, yeah, it would make sense to slip the license files into existing archives, but that would add another layer of complexity.
And these are just the issues that I'm anticipating right now when I'm typing this up. :)
Anyway, like I said, I want to address this, but it would open up a host of issues that I don't have time to deal with at the moment. Also note that if you go to your downloads tab, you can download a credits file that lists each and every thing you've downloaded, along with all the files that were contained in the submission, the author, the attribution notice, and the license(s), which I think addresses this to at least some extent.
So, your mention of the burn tool actually brings up an interesting line of discussion. There are a set of "rules" for what makes something pixel art, which can generally be distilled down to "you should know why each and every pixel is the precise color that it is."
Rules like this generally aren't arbitrary (and it's not like there's some Pixel Art Commission out there deciding what is and isn't pixel art), and they often come to be due to the fact that following those rules tends to produce better results or help you avoid issues later on.
That being said, as an artist, your goal is to produce the best possible art for your game in the time that you have. So if the burn tool works for you and it speeds up your process, then there's nothing wrong with continuing to use it, particularly since your use of it so far hasn't caused any visible issues. Your art doesn't have to conform to an exact set of processes in order to be good.
Now, there's a big caveat here for other people who might be reading this: If you're a beginning artist, you should be aware that the rules are there to help you, and to also to help others help you. If you're new to art in general, it's a good idea to follow the "rules" of whatever art form you're working on, because those rules help you avoid making beginner mistakes. When you reach KiEN's skill level, you're probably safe breaking the rules, provided you know why you're doing so. In OP's case, using the burn tool is a shortcut that allows more art to be produced faster with little or no sacrifice in final quality. In general, if "that's my style" is your reason for breaking a rule, then you probably shouldn't be breaking that rule until you've mastered a "style" that involves following the rules.
@caeles: You're welcome to do that, it's kind of overkill.
The art submission form is already too busy as it is, and the fact that there's so much to fill out is a frequent complaint that we get from people submitting art. Checking a box beside the license icon (which is linked to the text of the license) is a perfectly reasonable way for a submitter to indicate which licenses they're releasing their work under. If they *want* to add additional info, they're free to do so in the Copyright / Attribution Notice section, but for people (like myself) who aren't particularly picky about how they're credited, I don't want to force them through an extra step on a page where there are already too many steps.
Regarding the possibility of confusion about whether or not the icon is an ad for the GPL, I'll say this much: OGA has been around for half a decade now, and in that time, even with all the varying confusion about licenses, we've never once (to my knowledge) had that particular issue. And if we did, really the worst thing that will happen is that the user might ask the artist for permission (which does happen on occasion if people don't know what the licenses mean). I'd be much more concerned about the possibility of a false positive (that is, someone believing that a work has a license that it doesn't have) rather than a false negative (that is, someone being overly cautious).
That said, if any of this stuff really is a point of confusion for people, I'd like to hear from the community.
There's no technical reason to use less colors in your palette, but there are two non-technical reasons I can think of.
Working with a more limited palette is a bit easier.
Picking a limited set of colors ensures some consistency of style.
Honestly, these are both just style choices, in my opinion, so if you want to not limit yourself in terms of colors, I don't think there's anything wrong with just using whatever ones you want and staying away from a limited palette, but that's just me.
Anyway, that portrait is excellent. If I were to change anything about it, I'd say think about adding some highlights and shadows to the hair, and maybe a highlight on her visor.
Hi. I don't have enough spare cycles at the moment to come up with my own writing, but if you're willing to rewrite the relevant sections (with the changed bits in bold so that I can revirew them), I'll take a look and try to merge the changes into the FAQ.
Translated:
Problems are everywhere . try to be honest and respectful to one's own work and that of others . Sorry about the link below. I do not know how to remove it .
@Snabisch: What link are you talking about? I'm not seeing any.
So, a quick note, because we've had issues with this in the past:
I don't get the impression that anyone here has any misconceptions abouot this stuff, but for people wandering through and seeing this thread, I want to make sure that common misconceptions are cleared up.
Just wanted to say that I'm actually completely on board with archiving submissions with their respective license files; it's just something that will take a big effort to implement and will likely be bug prone for a while, so it's something I can't really touch until I have more time.
Consider this edge case: Someone submits a bunch of art with one license, and a week later, they go back and remove that license and add a different one. There are two ways this could be handled, and both are ugly:
There's also the matter of "I submitted this zip file, so why can't you just put the license in that file, rather than zipping up the license and my zip file inside another zip file?" I mean, yeah, it would make sense to slip the license files into existing archives, but that would add another layer of complexity.
And these are just the issues that I'm anticipating right now when I'm typing this up. :)
Anyway, like I said, I want to address this, but it would open up a host of issues that I don't have time to deal with at the moment. Also note that if you go to your downloads tab, you can download a credits file that lists each and every thing you've downloaded, along with all the files that were contained in the submission, the author, the attribution notice, and the license(s), which I think addresses this to at least some extent.
Are you using references?
So, your mention of the burn tool actually brings up an interesting line of discussion. There are a set of "rules" for what makes something pixel art, which can generally be distilled down to "you should know why each and every pixel is the precise color that it is."
Rules like this generally aren't arbitrary (and it's not like there's some Pixel Art Commission out there deciding what is and isn't pixel art), and they often come to be due to the fact that following those rules tends to produce better results or help you avoid issues later on.
That being said, as an artist, your goal is to produce the best possible art for your game in the time that you have. So if the burn tool works for you and it speeds up your process, then there's nothing wrong with continuing to use it, particularly since your use of it so far hasn't caused any visible issues. Your art doesn't have to conform to an exact set of processes in order to be good.
Now, there's a big caveat here for other people who might be reading this: If you're a beginning artist, you should be aware that the rules are there to help you, and to also to help others help you. If you're new to art in general, it's a good idea to follow the "rules" of whatever art form you're working on, because those rules help you avoid making beginner mistakes. When you reach KiEN's skill level, you're probably safe breaking the rules, provided you know why you're doing so. In OP's case, using the burn tool is a shortcut that allows more art to be produced faster with little or no sacrifice in final quality. In general, if "that's my style" is your reason for breaking a rule, then you probably shouldn't be breaking that rule until you've mastered a "style" that involves following the rules.
@caeles: You're welcome to do that, it's kind of overkill.
The art submission form is already too busy as it is, and the fact that there's so much to fill out is a frequent complaint that we get from people submitting art. Checking a box beside the license icon (which is linked to the text of the license) is a perfectly reasonable way for a submitter to indicate which licenses they're releasing their work under. If they *want* to add additional info, they're free to do so in the Copyright / Attribution Notice section, but for people (like myself) who aren't particularly picky about how they're credited, I don't want to force them through an extra step on a page where there are already too many steps.
Regarding the possibility of confusion about whether or not the icon is an ad for the GPL, I'll say this much: OGA has been around for half a decade now, and in that time, even with all the varying confusion about licenses, we've never once (to my knowledge) had that particular issue. And if we did, really the worst thing that will happen is that the user might ask the artist for permission (which does happen on occasion if people don't know what the licenses mean). I'd be much more concerned about the possibility of a false positive (that is, someone believing that a work has a license that it doesn't have) rather than a false negative (that is, someone being overly cautious).
That said, if any of this stuff really is a point of confusion for people, I'd like to hear from the community.
Hey, congrats on finishing your project!
Unfortunately, I don't have the right hardware to try your game out, but it looks like a neat concept. :)
Thanks for the heads up. I've fixed it.
Fortunately, that clause is explicitly *not* part of the license, so that makes things simpler.
There's no technical reason to use less colors in your palette, but there are two non-technical reasons I can think of.
Honestly, these are both just style choices, in my opinion, so if you want to not limit yourself in terms of colors, I don't think there's anything wrong with just using whatever ones you want and staying away from a limited palette, but that's just me.
Anyway, that portrait is excellent. If I were to change anything about it, I'd say think about adding some highlights and shadows to the hair, and maybe a highlight on her visor.
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