> Where are all these "free" programmers that you're talking about?
Join a game jam, most of them have a lot of collaboration offers. Of course when "free" person comes - it's not a "make a game for me" :) That's collaboration, not pay-free employment. But you make a game together - offer what you have, they'll offer what they have; you also need to bring something to the plate :)
E.g. if you are an artist who is willing to make a (slightly lewd) game - I'd have gladly joined with you if I wasn't already involved in my own long-term hobby project. In around a year or two, I'll have a 2-3 months down-time before starting a new project, I'll be more open at that moment. Or if you would like to jump on a train of the game I'm currently making and fix that abomination I call "art" (don't have illusions, it's a hell lot of work - hundreds of manhours), then I'll be more than open to changing the game concept/story according to your suggestions.
EDIT: But how can I entice you to join a game development project, even taking 80% of your game idea? If you just doodle some stuff on Twitter/Instagram, you'll get 10x involvement with your posts - I can't offer you fame. If you make a portfolio at Artstation/DevianArt - it's by far more valuable than "art by ThisGreatArtists" in some obscure game at itch.io with 20 downloads. You can simply make commissions at Fiverr and earn your $35/pic and don't care, better than making a free game nobody will ever play. All I can offer you is hard and tedious work.
EDIT2: AI can help here though. Twitter is already sinking in AI generated art, which is often faked as own art. This will undercut the value static unrelated images value at Artstation, as it's already getting flooded with those. And at Fiverr you'll need to sign your images by Microsoft's certificate that will prove that you have paid a lot of money for the certificate that is supposed to prove that you have created that art and not generated it. So, a line in the credits "art by ThisGreatArtists" in an obscure jam game will suddenly become valuable as it'll prove that you can produce a consistent artstyle, not just generate cute but unusable images. But yeah...
But the bottom line is: most likely we won't fit each other, you can't just get 2 random persons from 8 billions and poof they have common interests and make a cool game together. However, if you make a post: "Hey guys, I do art (here's examples), I have a cool game idea (here's a summary) - I'm looking for a programmer", you're very likely to get responses (just have a look at r/INAT at Reddit) and a chance to get someone to collaborate (if they'll stick around for long is a different question), and if inverse "I'm a programmer (here're my recent projects) looking for an artist to make a game with" - you're completely out of luck (except that artist can't make a game without a programmer, but a programmer can make a game without art which evens out the inequality a bit). Also if you check on many "revshare" projects (or free and open source) you'll see that they almost never have a shortage of programmers and musicians (even if "organized" by an idea guy who doesn't bring much to the development), but with very few exceptions - always lack of artists (even if there are any at start, they'll be the first to quit, as soon as they understand that making game-ready art is a boring tedious routine in comparison to doodling around for fun).
Of course there are exceptions too. But they only stress the rule.
The only consistent exception is fangames. As a programmer you will have a good chance of finding an artist for Sonic clone or Pokemon inspired game. But those are a very different beast.
That's my personal experience , and that's what I've seen in every project I've come across with a few exceptions like top-popular ones like STK or 0AD. Of course I can be wrong, I often am ;).
P.S. just a few days ago I tried to ask AI to sketch me ideas for monsters in my game (as a programmer I know what they do, but I have no idea how they should look). Yes, you've guessed correctly, after a few hours I didn't get a single image that can be used even as a remote inspiration. So, don't worry, artists are perfectly safe. For now. And for years to come. And no, I won't hire a concept artist for this task either.
Or alternatively you can modify those not to look like the trademarked/copyrighted stuff. Change color, change position of the buttons and other elements, maybe shape a bit and it should be good.
Thinking more about it... I wonder if the inverse is true:
Affordable artists are the end of AI?
As funny as it sounds, you can easily find a "free" programmer and "free" musician. But almost never a "free" artist for an open source project. One of the reasons most open source projects can be extremely elaborate logic-wise (just take some roguelikes), often have amazing soundtrack but look like total trash art-wise.
Just look at Twitter for another example. An artist posts a doodle made in an hour or two and it gets half a hundred retweets and 2-3 thousands of likes in a day. A gamedev team of 10 people post a footage from a game they've been working on for 2 years by now, the quality of the art in game is by far higher than of that doodle... 2-3 retweets by bots + 5-10 likes when published can be counted as a lucky strike.
Just recently I've been sketching "how much would it cost to hire an artist for my game"? The game uses ultra primitive art (lineart). For as long as I've seen artists usually never take less than $15 per picture of the quality I need. I need minimum of (8+8)x3 = 48 such pictures, which totals $720, even if by some miracles those will be enough and adding here UI design and some other minor stuff... unlikely it'll pass under $1k, and that's the cheapest of the cheapest price tags, which may still result in low quality art (the one who buys cheap - pays twice, as they say).
And all of that for a game I'll never be selling but will publish for free. So, to trash bin the 200-300 hours of (free) programming go! For my poor artistic skills it takes at least 7 hours per picture = 350-400 hours, not something that I can afford, especially for art that looks like my art, i.e. garbage. And just donating $1k to humanity who will only complain that there are no animations...
So, maybe some day AI will help me (for only cost of an expensive videocard which will still be cheaper than $1k) to finish this game and release it for free for everyone. Or maybe some day AI will create a decent competition for mid-to-low skill leveled artists so that they will consider setting affordable prices for their work or even voluntarily join opensource projects to advance their skills and get a line in their portfolio.
Right now again I'm working on a free and open source game. Trash art went into the root of its game design. I know I'll never ever afford good art for my game. I'm willing to work for free - just so that a few players may enjoy the game, artists aren't :) Maybe some day AI will help make someone's evening a tiny bit brighter? Will I live to see this day?
I can see the revision info for my submissions and I can see the license change in the revision history (CC-BY-SA -> CC0 for that specific one), however, I cannot access that page as an unregistered user and I cannot access "older revision" link as an unregistered user. I wonder this feature may be beneficial.
That's a shame. But at least they don't try to cheat you and tell straight it's some murky "content license" (I'm not a laywer, so all custom licensed assets are discarded immediately), in contrast explicitly saying "copyright-free (something)" like some music authors do on youtube and then in fine print on their website you see it's something similar to CC-BY-NC or "for personal use only".
> The legally binding contract
But practically they (or even some unrelated copyright troll) just DCMA your game out of Steam and good luck talking to Valve support and trying to prove you are not a camel.
I love the saying: "To get a good result out of AI the client will need to clearly specify what he wants. Designers, we are safe." So, definitely not the end of 2D artists, at least for the nearest few decades.
Regarding to the images. Yes, they look cool. And it's absolutely mind-blowing what machine learning can do now. We are living in an exciting time.
But let's look at those closer. What are they good for? Can I put them into my game? Where? Even if I've made a visual novel - I need my main character to pilot the same mech... not just a bunch of random robot-like images in background. Hypothetically I can make a collectible card game with those - or put them as backgrounds into some menus - or just put random images into wiki of my game. But honestly, the usefullness is either very limited or nees to "make a game specifically for AI" (which is also a valid approach, but I'm yet to see it work in practice).
I've seen around "AI assets generators", those are much more promising (generating consistent assets like pixelart tilesets). Unfortunately I haven't investigated this topic closer, of what I've seen... yeah, generating more or less abstract images for ability buttons. It's already a good usecase for the start, but that doesn't make them usable inside a game.
I can also make some collage in GIMP which might even look ok with "a bit of curation". But as soon as I start adding it into the game it all goes to shreds and looks like garbage because I can't keep consistent artstyle, neither can AI, at least yet.
As a solo hobbyist dev I'm eagerly looking forward to the moment when AI will be able to at least assist me with making art for my games under clean FOSS-compatible license. But I'm not sure if I'll live long enough to see this :)
I don't think there are any official rules around sensitive content. But the content is called "sensitive" for a reason: "When in doubt, don't". I guess that properly correspond to the MedicineStorm's reply in the second message here.
E.g. I personally have a few graphics I could share (they are available at open license in my projects repositories), but following this rule I don't because there is a nudity layer in those + some items/clothes are not appropriate for general audience.
Don't count on a prompt response, even on response at all. The authors don't owe you support. They've clearly stated the license as CC0 both here and on their website. It was 1.5 years ago, the latest tweet from them was 1.5 years ago, maybe they don't walk among the living anymore (it's a fun time to live in, COVID included). Don't put your hopes and welfare on somebody's response to an e-mail. Choose either to trust, to wait, or to give up on these assets if you don't trust them for some reason.
> Where are all these "free" programmers that you're talking about?
Join a game jam, most of them have a lot of collaboration offers. Of course when "free" person comes - it's not a "make a game for me" :) That's collaboration, not pay-free employment. But you make a game together - offer what you have, they'll offer what they have; you also need to bring something to the plate :)
E.g. if you are an artist who is willing to make a (slightly lewd) game - I'd have gladly joined with you if I wasn't already involved in my own long-term hobby project. In around a year or two, I'll have a 2-3 months down-time before starting a new project, I'll be more open at that moment. Or if you would like to jump on a train of the game I'm currently making and fix that abomination I call "art" (don't have illusions, it's a hell lot of work - hundreds of manhours), then I'll be more than open to changing the game concept/story according to your suggestions.
EDIT: But how can I entice you to join a game development project, even taking 80% of your game idea? If you just doodle some stuff on Twitter/Instagram, you'll get 10x involvement with your posts - I can't offer you fame. If you make a portfolio at Artstation/DevianArt - it's by far more valuable than "art by ThisGreatArtists" in some obscure game at itch.io with 20 downloads. You can simply make commissions at Fiverr and earn your $35/pic and don't care, better than making a free game nobody will ever play. All I can offer you is hard and tedious work.
EDIT2: AI can help here though. Twitter is already sinking in AI generated art, which is often faked as own art. This will undercut the value static unrelated images value at Artstation, as it's already getting flooded with those. And at Fiverr you'll need to sign your images by Microsoft's certificate that will prove that you have paid a lot of money for the certificate that is supposed to prove that you have created that art and not generated it. So, a line in the credits "art by ThisGreatArtists" in an obscure jam game will suddenly become valuable as it'll prove that you can produce a consistent artstyle, not just generate cute but unusable images. But yeah...
But the bottom line is: most likely we won't fit each other, you can't just get 2 random persons from 8 billions and poof they have common interests and make a cool game together. However, if you make a post: "Hey guys, I do art (here's examples), I have a cool game idea (here's a summary) - I'm looking for a programmer", you're very likely to get responses (just have a look at r/INAT at Reddit) and a chance to get someone to collaborate (if they'll stick around for long is a different question), and if inverse "I'm a programmer (here're my recent projects) looking for an artist to make a game with" - you're completely out of luck (except that artist can't make a game without a programmer, but a programmer can make a game without art which evens out the inequality a bit). Also if you check on many "revshare" projects (or free and open source) you'll see that they almost never have a shortage of programmers and musicians (even if "organized" by an idea guy who doesn't bring much to the development), but with very few exceptions - always lack of artists (even if there are any at start, they'll be the first to quit, as soon as they understand that making game-ready art is a boring tedious routine in comparison to doodling around for fun).
Of course there are exceptions too. But they only stress the rule.
The only consistent exception is fangames. As a programmer you will have a good chance of finding an artist for Sonic clone or Pokemon inspired game. But those are a very different beast.
That's my personal experience , and that's what I've seen in every project I've come across with a few exceptions like top-popular ones like STK or 0AD. Of course I can be wrong, I often am ;).
P.S. just a few days ago I tried to ask AI to sketch me ideas for monsters in my game (as a programmer I know what they do, but I have no idea how they should look). Yes, you've guessed correctly, after a few hours I didn't get a single image that can be used even as a remote inspiration. So, don't worry, artists are perfectly safe. For now. And for years to come. And no, I won't hire a concept artist for this task either.
Or alternatively you can modify those not to look like the trademarked/copyrighted stuff. Change color, change position of the buttons and other elements, maybe shape a bit and it should be good.
Thinking more about it... I wonder if the inverse is true:
Affordable artists are the end of AI?
As funny as it sounds, you can easily find a "free" programmer and "free" musician. But almost never a "free" artist for an open source project. One of the reasons most open source projects can be extremely elaborate logic-wise (just take some roguelikes), often have amazing soundtrack but look like total trash art-wise.
Just look at Twitter for another example. An artist posts a doodle made in an hour or two and it gets half a hundred retweets and 2-3 thousands of likes in a day. A gamedev team of 10 people post a footage from a game they've been working on for 2 years by now, the quality of the art in game is by far higher than of that doodle... 2-3 retweets by bots + 5-10 likes when published can be counted as a lucky strike.
Just recently I've been sketching "how much would it cost to hire an artist for my game"? The game uses ultra primitive art (lineart). For as long as I've seen artists usually never take less than $15 per picture of the quality I need. I need minimum of (8+8)x3 = 48 such pictures, which totals $720, even if by some miracles those will be enough and adding here UI design and some other minor stuff... unlikely it'll pass under $1k, and that's the cheapest of the cheapest price tags, which may still result in low quality art (the one who buys cheap - pays twice, as they say).
And all of that for a game I'll never be selling but will publish for free. So, to trash bin the 200-300 hours of (free) programming go! For my poor artistic skills it takes at least 7 hours per picture = 350-400 hours, not something that I can afford, especially for art that looks like my art, i.e. garbage. And just donating $1k to humanity who will only complain that there are no animations...
So, maybe some day AI will help me (for only cost of an expensive videocard which will still be cheaper than $1k) to finish this game and release it for free for everyone. Or maybe some day AI will create a decent competition for mid-to-low skill leveled artists so that they will consider setting affordable prices for their work or even voluntarily join opensource projects to advance their skills and get a line in their portfolio.
Right now again I'm working on a free and open source game. Trash art went into the root of its game design. I know I'll never ever afford good art for my game. I'm willing to work for free - just so that a few players may enjoy the game, artists aren't :) Maybe some day AI will help make someone's evening a tiny bit brighter? Will I live to see this day?
I can see the revision info for my submissions and I can see the license change in the revision history (CC-BY-SA -> CC0 for that specific one), however, I cannot access that page as an unregistered user and I cannot access "older revision" link as an unregistered user. I wonder this feature may be beneficial.
That's a shame. But at least they don't try to cheat you and tell straight it's some murky "content license" (I'm not a laywer, so all custom licensed assets are discarded immediately), in contrast explicitly saying "copyright-free (something)" like some music authors do on youtube and then in fine print on their website you see it's something similar to CC-BY-NC or "for personal use only".
> The legally binding contract
But practically they (or even some unrelated copyright troll) just DCMA your game out of Steam and good luck talking to Valve support and trying to prove you are not a camel.
I love the saying: "To get a good result out of AI the client will need to clearly specify what he wants. Designers, we are safe." So, definitely not the end of 2D artists, at least for the nearest few decades.
Regarding to the images. Yes, they look cool. And it's absolutely mind-blowing what machine learning can do now. We are living in an exciting time.
But let's look at those closer. What are they good for? Can I put them into my game? Where? Even if I've made a visual novel - I need my main character to pilot the same mech... not just a bunch of random robot-like images in background. Hypothetically I can make a collectible card game with those - or put them as backgrounds into some menus - or just put random images into wiki of my game. But honestly, the usefullness is either very limited or nees to "make a game specifically for AI" (which is also a valid approach, but I'm yet to see it work in practice).
I've seen around "AI assets generators", those are much more promising (generating consistent assets like pixelart tilesets). Unfortunately I haven't investigated this topic closer, of what I've seen... yeah, generating more or less abstract images for ability buttons. It's already a good usecase for the start, but that doesn't make them usable inside a game.
I can also make some collage in GIMP which might even look ok with "a bit of curation". But as soon as I start adding it into the game it all goes to shreds and looks like garbage because I can't keep consistent artstyle, neither can AI, at least yet.
As a solo hobbyist dev I'm eagerly looking forward to the moment when AI will be able to at least assist me with making art for my games under clean FOSS-compatible license. But I'm not sure if I'll live long enough to see this :)
[In reply to a deleted post :)]
I don't think there are any official rules around sensitive content. But the content is called "sensitive" for a reason: "When in doubt, don't". I guess that properly correspond to the MedicineStorm's reply in the second message here.
E.g. I personally have a few graphics I could share (they are available at open license in my projects repositories), but following this rule I don't because there is a nudity layer in those + some items/clothes are not appropriate for general audience.
It seems like link martinlinda.cz from https://opengameart.org/content/berusky-ii-ost-action-puzzle-game-soundt... (at author's name) no longer exists and leads to some photos site with broken certificate.
Don't count on a prompt response, even on response at all. The authors don't owe you support. They've clearly stated the license as CC0 both here and on their website. It was 1.5 years ago, the latest tweet from them was 1.5 years ago, maybe they don't walk among the living anymore (it's a fun time to live in, COVID included). Don't put your hopes and welfare on somebody's response to an e-mail. Choose either to trust, to wait, or to give up on these assets if you don't trust them for some reason.
I guess Rhythm should be winter, not summer?
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