Announcing the Liberated Pixel Cup: an epic contest for gaming freedom
We're pleased to announce the launch of the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game authoring competition being launched in cooperation between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt!
Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of this… but that will only happen if people like you get involved!
Technically the project will run in three phases. One of the major goals of the project is for the community to be able to produce content that's stylistically consistent. To that end, "phase zero" of the project is to produce a style guide that people can work off to produce content that meshes together nicely, something along the lines of what the Tango style guide does for icons. We've been working with a few excellent artists to commission a base example set to build the style guide out of, and we're fairly thrilled with where things are going!
And this is where you come in: "Phase one" of the competition will then be building artwork that matches that guide that should then be uploaded to OpenGameArt and dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3. This part of the project will run from June 1st through June 30th. "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, and this portion of the contest will run from July 1st through July 31st.
Afterwards will be judging entries and handing out awards. We're planning on giving out some prizes for both the content building and the game programming phases. To see more details about all this, check out the rules page.
We think Liberated Pixel Cup is a great opportunity for the commons in many ways! Right now it's hard to find free culture content to bootstrap games that match a consistent style and hard for artists to collaborate on such. We're also very interested in areas where free software and free culture directly intersect, which we don't always see enough of (and which sometimes can even get a bit complex, so it's good to have opportunities to think about them when we can), and games are a great example of this overlap. We hope you'll participate!
And on that note, there's several things we'd like to fund with this project. First of all, we'd like to pay the artists that have we've commissioned for this style guide actual money, as laying down a set of fundamentals for the artwork is a lot of serious work. Second, we'd like to be able to do cool things like give out prizes for people who win the various stages of the competition.
To that end, we're trying to raise some money for the Liberated Pixel Cup. So please help make that happen, and donate today!