The Liberated Pixel Cup

[artisticdude]

Last month bart, the founder of OpenGameArt.org, posted this announcement in his blog:

OpenGameArt.org is very proud to announce that we are collaborating with the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons to bring you the Liberated Pixel Cup, a two month long summer contest about creating a consistent set of art and then making awesome games with it!

As you might imagine, this is big news for OGA -- there's no better way for us to further our mission of bringing artists and developers together to make awesome free and open source games than having the opportunity to work together with the CC and the FSF towards making that happen!



So, what are you waiting for? Go, check out the site, and join us on IRC at #liberatedpixelcup on irc.freenode.net.

You can read bart's original post on OGA here.

Basically it's a collective effort between OpenGameArt.org, the Creative Commons, and the Free Software Foundation to host a two-part contest to create as much open-source art (which will be licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3) in as consistent a style as possible, and then make as many games with those assets as possible.

The artwork

Phase one of the competition is to build a set of artwork that's dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3 and stylistically consistent. To that end, we're currently working on a style guide which incorporates these components. As you can see, for this competition we're working on an overhead 16 bit rpg inspired style (technically: front-facing overhead orthographic view) with 32x32 tiles. The selection of this style is intentional: we're trying to build something easy to collaborate upon on which a wide variety of games (overhead shooters, RPGs, adventure games, strategy games) can be built.

When the competition begins, artists will be asked to make artwork that matches this existing style and upload to OpenGameArt.org under the forementioned licenses. Winners will be selected on judgements of quality, how well they match the style guide, etc. Phase one runs from June 1st thru June 30th. For more information, check out the url=http://lpc.opengameart.org/content/lpc-rules]rules.[/url]


The games

Phase two of this competition will be building GPLv3 or later games that incorporate artwork from the artwork building phase of the project. People can work in teams or individually. Participants will be judged based on fun factor, innovativeness, and of course how well they incorporate assets built for the contest. Phase two runs from July 1st thru July 31st.

Please note that for a game to qualify as a contest entry, it must compile and run on 100% free (as in freedom) software from the ground up.


You!

Liberated Pixel Cup will be awesome, but it can't happen without the help of people like you!

We're paying artists for comissions on the artwork for the initial style guide, and we'd like to give away prizes for those who win the competition. You can help make this project all the more awesome with your donation!

So if you're an artist or a programmer (or both), here's your chance to contribute to the open-source community and have a chance at winning some possible $$ prizes. You can find out more by going to The Liberated Pixel Cup website. I will be trying to participate in the art phase myself, if my schedule permits. I'd like to go for the coding phase too, but I'm afraid my coding skillz (such as they are) aren't quite up to that challenge yet.