@XCVG: Fair enough, I spoke too soon. I guess it's going back to the issue of using software licenses for art. That said, it would probably still be best for the artists to select a more art-focused license choice.
From what I'm seeing, probably none of them. "All rights reserved" is not a very FOSS-friendly kind of phrase, and none of the text gives a clear idea of how you want the art to be treated. If you want to relicense/dual-license the art assets to be OGA-compatible I'd suggest that you read through the descriptions of the licenses used here and see if one of them fits what you want.
"Just a simple game at start, that will grow over time. (Just like runescape did/are doing)"
Runescape was made by a team who already had experience in professionally developing online games (anyone else remember the Gamesdomain Castle?) and of course they've had a decade or so to build on it. You're not even at the point they were when they started. Think smaller for now.
When I say their work would end up repurposed, I mean by the artist who is left with a lot of work they've done for a project that hasn't worked out. It's almost inevitable, I've seen it happen, I've had it happen to me as well.
I can point you towards basically one exception, which I happen to have been involved with. It's a 2D MMOrpg called Phobos which recently entered closed beta testing. It started out as a small team with very little game-making experience, including a lot of artists who were all accostomed to working in a particular style but had essentially no experience working on actual games (a consequence of a particularly vibrant fan-art community for another MMO which ended up losing interest in that MMO as it lost interest in that side of the fanbase). From those beginnings, and with a relatively large number of artists with drawing experience but no game-making experience (ie, young and naive), some enthusiastic story-writers and a programmer with some experience but no real game-making credits, we have ended up with a very beautiful and playable product (behind closed doors still, but yeah). But do you know how long it took? We started almost 9 years ago. And it's still not released. The whole thing had to be reprogrammed, we've cycled pretty much all of our graphics in and out again, and over that time I've gone from being a middle schooler to a grad student. In the mean time I watched a number of other similar projects be born, show promise, wither and die. I've also seen a couple of other small MMOs make it to a released and money-making product, though both are helmed with experienced programmers and both initially tapped into that same, oddly-productive fanbase for free work (including me :) ). But neither of them has really hit it big despite the enormous amount of time and effort put in by their dedicated teams. Both of them have had to be remade from scratch a couple of times and sloughed off almost their entire playerbase a couple of times in the process.
So I should nuance what I said a bit: it's not exactly impossible, because it's been done, kind of. But gosh darn it it's not the way to start out if you want to do things properly. It's a big pain to have to redo and reredo all of your work, and that's only if you are one of the rare and happy few who survive long enough to have to correct the foundational errors that happened early on. And without those unique circumstances of a weird community of isolated pixel artists who honed their skills for kicks with no thought that they might be valuable to real projects, and who were easily excited for any project that would be interested in their work, it's going to be even harder going. Start with something less ambitious. One big advantage you have over those projects is the big archive of freely-available stuff right here on OGA. None of that existed back when we got started. It means you can work on building experience on your side of things without having to worry about the drama of maintaining a team and without having to depend on an artist. Once you have one or two projects like that done people are more likely to want to work with you on something bigger, because you'll be more likely to succeed, and to succeed by a more direct path.
"I have been creating games since i was about 8, nothing too fancy and nothing ever got finished as i am still trying to learn as much as possible."
That's fine for a beginning dev. Everyone starts somewhere and it's good that you do have a history of interest.
Unless you want to make "a (mmo)RPG game." RPGs, ESPECIALLY MMOrpgs, are huge projects which require a lot of work both on the design/code front and on the asset front, not to mention things like mapping and writing. It is flat-out not the kind of project you want to try for your first completed game. It simply will not happen, and if you did get an inexperienced artist on board (and I say inexperienced because game artists with experience have seen this many times before), their work will end up repurposed for another project or entirely wasted.
It's great that you want to get into game dev, but save yourself a huge headache and think a bit smaller for your early projects.
I hate to say it, but it's unlikely that people are going to be falling over themselves to make free custom graphics for your learning exercise. That's with no offense meant to you, but you're asking for a pretty significant time commitment from someone with very little assurance that there will be much benefit. You're just not at the point in your game-making career where the final result is likely to warrant that kind of investment. This is one of the needs that OGA was made to fill--making custom graphics for every project like this would rather defeat the purpose.
So I would suggest you spend some quality time looking through the archives and find things that will do for now. If your game does end up reaching a level of scope and completeness that it will interest artists more then you can always replace them later. Or you can put up some cash--that usually works too.
I doubt OGA itself would run into serious legal trouble, but there would be plenty of the normal sort of trouble if a dev ever had legal trouble from using an asset hosted on OGA.
@Jaden: I think you are underestimating how many possibilities there are even in a limited space. Statements like "there is literally no other means of drawing high quality pixel art in those dimensions" are completely hyperbolic. Let me reiterate: there is no question that this was intended to be a close copy of the RPG Maker base and that the similarities go well beyond coincidence. This is simply not a matter of limited creative space. That becomes a serious factor at very small resolutions (16x16, etc) but at this size it isn't really that relevant.
@Undesired: First, stuff sometimes gets missed. Just making a post on the art itself may or may not get the attention of someone who can deal with it, and just making an allegation of copying without substantiation isn't really enough. For instance, on the sprites that you say are derived from FF6, while the faces do look similar the sprite as a whole doesn't really. As I mentioned above similarities like that are not terribly remarkable at very low resolutions--with a symmetrical face the effective pixel area is something like 3x4, which does impose serious limitations on what's possible. As as to the freezalike... it's a totally different kind of edge case which I feel even less confident about. I'll try to bring it to Bart's attention if I see him on the IRC. Btw, thanks for pointing out the spammer, I have deleted it.
@byeOGA: uh, bye. Sorry you feel like you need to leave. But making sure that the assets here are safe to use is a non-negotiable priority. I'd rather that we lean towards caution rather than endangering devs down the line.
@Gnudist: good question. OGA doesn't get that many spam submissions and they're usually caught pretty quickly, but it might be a good feature to request of Bart.
I don't have any direct experience, but I believe the RPG maker people charge money to license their assets for non-RPG-Maker usage, so I think we can guess pretty quickly what their resposne would be. I think the only solution would be to change the parts that are currently too similar. This is clearly not something that would be too difficult for Tap, but that's entirely up to him.
Excessively anime--somewhere between Kaladin and Kamina to be precise. It practically oozes thick, viscous mangas.
@XCVG: Fair enough, I spoke too soon. I guess it's going back to the issue of using software licenses for art. That said, it would probably still be best for the artists to select a more art-focused license choice.
From what I'm seeing, probably none of them. "All rights reserved" is not a very FOSS-friendly kind of phrase, and none of the text gives a clear idea of how you want the art to be treated. If you want to relicense/dual-license the art assets to be OGA-compatible I'd suggest that you read through the descriptions of the licenses used here and see if one of them fits what you want.
"Just a simple game at start, that will grow over time. (Just like runescape did/are doing)"
Runescape was made by a team who already had experience in professionally developing online games (anyone else remember the Gamesdomain Castle?) and of course they've had a decade or so to build on it. You're not even at the point they were when they started. Think smaller for now.
When I say their work would end up repurposed, I mean by the artist who is left with a lot of work they've done for a project that hasn't worked out. It's almost inevitable, I've seen it happen, I've had it happen to me as well.
I can point you towards basically one exception, which I happen to have been involved with. It's a 2D MMOrpg called Phobos which recently entered closed beta testing. It started out as a small team with very little game-making experience, including a lot of artists who were all accostomed to working in a particular style but had essentially no experience working on actual games (a consequence of a particularly vibrant fan-art community for another MMO which ended up losing interest in that MMO as it lost interest in that side of the fanbase). From those beginnings, and with a relatively large number of artists with drawing experience but no game-making experience (ie, young and naive), some enthusiastic story-writers and a programmer with some experience but no real game-making credits, we have ended up with a very beautiful and playable product (behind closed doors still, but yeah). But do you know how long it took? We started almost 9 years ago. And it's still not released. The whole thing had to be reprogrammed, we've cycled pretty much all of our graphics in and out again, and over that time I've gone from being a middle schooler to a grad student. In the mean time I watched a number of other similar projects be born, show promise, wither and die. I've also seen a couple of other small MMOs make it to a released and money-making product, though both are helmed with experienced programmers and both initially tapped into that same, oddly-productive fanbase for free work (including me :) ). But neither of them has really hit it big despite the enormous amount of time and effort put in by their dedicated teams. Both of them have had to be remade from scratch a couple of times and sloughed off almost their entire playerbase a couple of times in the process.
So I should nuance what I said a bit: it's not exactly impossible, because it's been done, kind of. But gosh darn it it's not the way to start out if you want to do things properly. It's a big pain to have to redo and reredo all of your work, and that's only if you are one of the rare and happy few who survive long enough to have to correct the foundational errors that happened early on. And without those unique circumstances of a weird community of isolated pixel artists who honed their skills for kicks with no thought that they might be valuable to real projects, and who were easily excited for any project that would be interested in their work, it's going to be even harder going. Start with something less ambitious. One big advantage you have over those projects is the big archive of freely-available stuff right here on OGA. None of that existed back when we got started. It means you can work on building experience on your side of things without having to worry about the drama of maintaining a team and without having to depend on an artist. Once you have one or two projects like that done people are more likely to want to work with you on something bigger, because you'll be more likely to succeed, and to succeed by a more direct path.
"I have been creating games since i was about 8, nothing too fancy and nothing ever got finished as i am still trying to learn as much as possible."
That's fine for a beginning dev. Everyone starts somewhere and it's good that you do have a history of interest.
Unless you want to make "a (mmo)RPG game." RPGs, ESPECIALLY MMOrpgs, are huge projects which require a lot of work both on the design/code front and on the asset front, not to mention things like mapping and writing. It is flat-out not the kind of project you want to try for your first completed game. It simply will not happen, and if you did get an inexperienced artist on board (and I say inexperienced because game artists with experience have seen this many times before), their work will end up repurposed for another project or entirely wasted.
It's great that you want to get into game dev, but save yourself a huge headache and think a bit smaller for your early projects.
This looks like a serious bargain for these assets. I don't really have much in my paypal atm but I'll try to get a donation in before it's over.
I hate to say it, but it's unlikely that people are going to be falling over themselves to make free custom graphics for your learning exercise. That's with no offense meant to you, but you're asking for a pretty significant time commitment from someone with very little assurance that there will be much benefit. You're just not at the point in your game-making career where the final result is likely to warrant that kind of investment. This is one of the needs that OGA was made to fill--making custom graphics for every project like this would rather defeat the purpose.
So I would suggest you spend some quality time looking through the archives and find things that will do for now. If your game does end up reaching a level of scope and completeness that it will interest artists more then you can always replace them later. Or you can put up some cash--that usually works too.
I doubt OGA itself would run into serious legal trouble, but there would be plenty of the normal sort of trouble if a dev ever had legal trouble from using an asset hosted on OGA.
@Jaden: I think you are underestimating how many possibilities there are even in a limited space. Statements like "there is literally no other means of drawing high quality pixel art in those dimensions" are completely hyperbolic. Let me reiterate: there is no question that this was intended to be a close copy of the RPG Maker base and that the similarities go well beyond coincidence. This is simply not a matter of limited creative space. That becomes a serious factor at very small resolutions (16x16, etc) but at this size it isn't really that relevant.
@Undesired: First, stuff sometimes gets missed. Just making a post on the art itself may or may not get the attention of someone who can deal with it, and just making an allegation of copying without substantiation isn't really enough. For instance, on the sprites that you say are derived from FF6, while the faces do look similar the sprite as a whole doesn't really. As I mentioned above similarities like that are not terribly remarkable at very low resolutions--with a symmetrical face the effective pixel area is something like 3x4, which does impose serious limitations on what's possible. As as to the freezalike... it's a totally different kind of edge case which I feel even less confident about. I'll try to bring it to Bart's attention if I see him on the IRC. Btw, thanks for pointing out the spammer, I have deleted it.
@byeOGA: uh, bye. Sorry you feel like you need to leave. But making sure that the assets here are safe to use is a non-negotiable priority. I'd rather that we lean towards caution rather than endangering devs down the line.
@Gnudist: good question. OGA doesn't get that many spam submissions and they're usually caught pretty quickly, but it might be a good feature to request of Bart.
I don't have any direct experience, but I believe the RPG maker people charge money to license their assets for non-RPG-Maker usage, so I think we can guess pretty quickly what their resposne would be. I think the only solution would be to change the parts that are currently too similar. This is clearly not something that would be too difficult for Tap, but that's entirely up to him.
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