The Liberated Pixel Cup: a Game Making Contest From the CC, FSF, and OpenGameArt 53
Lendrick writes "OpenGameArt.org, the Free Software Foundation, and the Creative Commons are teaming up to bring the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game making contest starting on June 1st and going through July 31st. The contest will be divided into two phases: the first phase will be about adding on to a consistent set of art commissioned specially for the contest, and the second phase, starting on July 1st, will be about building games using the provided art."
Re:Linux support pretty much required? (Score:4, Informative)
Funny, they don't force the artists to use GIMP over tools they are familiar with. Sometimes people just like using a game competition as an excuse to make a game and not as a platform for some idealogical political crap. Why else would so many people enter into game jams where there aren't even winners?
As has been stated earlier, it is perfectly fine if your game runs on any of those proprietary platforms listed. It just needs to also run on a free-as-in-freedom platform, since that's the point of the contest. To be clear, it's not about restricting developers, it's about not restricting users. If your game requires a proprietary toolkit such as XNA, you've limited yourself to people who have purchased Windows. If you build your game out of free libraries, as long as you do it correctly, it will run very happily on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.
Can we also assume that the judges are savvy enough to compile and install my game on Linux (and it's dependencies)?
The rules address this question:
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.
I think it's pretty clear from that that the judges are willing to compile your game in order to run it, but would appreciate if you stick to relatively common libraries and make sure compilation is a smooth process.
Can I require them to have working OpenGL even if that means they need to install scary proprietary GL drivers?
Your tone here is unnecessarily rude. For the record, there are non-proprietary OpenGL drivers that work just fine, so you don't need to worry about OpenGL support.
The way these GPL people push their ideals really tick me off sometimes. I've sort of jokingly thought that I should change my open source projects from a BSD license to a modified one that doesn't allow static linking with GPL libraries. Seems fair right? Why shouldn't I also punish developers for using restrictive licenses (such as the GPL).
In the grand scheme of things, allowing contest entries to use any other license (even CC0) in addition to the GPL is a pretty poor way of "pushing" the GPL on people, don't you think? We're requiring it for licensing consistency, because it provides a level of freedom that we deem necessary for the contest. If you wish to grant your users additional freedoms by releasing your code under other licenses in addition to the GPL, that's completely fine.