Let's Play Permissions for Open Source Games With Free Art

Let's Play (LP) is an uprising form of previewing and experiencing video games.

While a review summarizes the experience, a LP allows to look a player over their shoulder and indirectly experience the game from one perspective in its entirety - if both Let's Player and viewer have the endurance.

LPs have many styles: non-commented, informational, humorous... And their production quality varies too, be it video, audio or presentation.

Example of a Let's Play video in its natural environment

Some creators of LPs ("LPers") earn money using YouTube's monetization features. When they do, YouTube's semi-automatic moderation process starts paying more attention to the videos' compliance with copyright.

Sometimes, LPers will contact game developers to receive permission to create LPs. To many creators of games, LPs are a welcome form of promotion and they will always say yes.

Clint Bellanger of FLARE released a Let's Play policy, which elegantly covers both the situation in which a game's art assets are CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed and where all copyright belongs to one person.

FLARE is a collaborative effort of many artists who agreed to release their art under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and I think that FLARE's LP policy reflects the intention of the license very well.

A complicated case might be a game which contains art that is under the GPL, which could be interpreted in a way, that requires the resulting video, as well as video project files to be made available under GPL as well.

In theory, any LP could be considered "fair use". However, for-profit use and use of large portions of a work are often considered as not being "fair use" - for example by YouTube.

For game designers, I consider LPs to be a valuable resource, allowing to look up features or part-experience gameplay, where acquiring, installing and playing the game would be impossible, due to time restrictions.

I recommend looking up games that you have fond memories of or which you always wanted to try but the installation effort was too high on lparchive.org or just YouTube's search function with "let's play" in the query.

If YouTube's HTML5 doesn't work for you, youtube-dl will allow you to circumvent flash player issues (monetized YouTube videos appear to require flash).

World Boss run by Ace (Knight) and Isabell (Archer)

Hey guys, here is a World Boss run by Ace where he is showing specifically for knights a sort of a sequence where he gets to use both runes like brutality as well as sylph transformation. He makes 106k gold on his run as a will destroyer knight, which is OK :) although just to let you know Ace I make 100k on AFK mode, so you really should switch to crit for WB :)

Anyways you guys are more than welcome to check out his video and hopefully it helps you if you like to have fun in manual mode.



EDIT: and here is an Archer World Boss run sent by Isabell:

Video Change Logs: Make Your Own!

[video: OpenMW 0.10.0 Change Log]

OpenMW has been steadily reporting about latest progress on their blog and now also released some video change logs with audio commentary.

Freedroid is another project that has been reporting their progress regularly. You can follow them and many more projects on our game planet or dev planet.

To me, short video commentary reports of progress are a delight. While it might be ineffective to make a video for each release, if the changes are not so many and the effort is high, but from time to time having a video change log might be better at getting players interested or developers impressed enough to contribute than a simple CHANGES.txt.

An interesting middle ground is what M.A.R.S. did for their last few releases: screenshot changelogs.

GLC is one of the two nice ways I use to record game videos - here STK

When it comes to gameplay video recording on Linux, I spent some time on the subject and for me it all boiled down to two methods:

1. GLC is ideal for games that use both OpenGL and ALSA
2. FFMpeg is an all-rounder, that is a bit slower but works fine if the machine is powerful enough or the resolution low enough

I will gladly offer my experience in recording videos and editing them on Linux to help you make your own. Just post in the comments, start a thread on the forums or email me via qubodup@gmail.com.

GeneticInvasion : a brand new Tower Defence

Hi! I'm here to show you a new game that I'm working on: GeneticInvasion

It's Tower Defence game, but it has something special: it uses evolutionary algorithms.
The idea of evolutionary algorithm is to use darwin theory to solve problems:

• We generate random solution to the problem.


• We evaluate them.


• We take some of the better ones, apply random mutations to them, and generate an offspring from them.


• The child replaces their parents in the solution population to form a new generation.


• And we do this, again and again, until we find a solution that is good enough.

Well, in GeneticInvasion, the problem, is you. So enemies evolve in order to crush you.

Download the .webm video

We used a real evolutionary computation library called EO to make this game. The library is being used for many serious projects.

So, you heard me, an army of colorful enemies are trying to eliminate you, don't just sit here, fight!

Some notes:

• For the first time since we began to develop it, the game is now interesting to play. That means that it's neither too easy nor too hard to play.


• I also added 3 levels that are supposed to be sorted by difficulty.


• There is a medal system, so you can try to get gold on all 3 of them. (I failed to get the gold medal on the third one through :P)


• There are no binaries, if someone is feeling like doing some, please contact me.


• The game is theoretically compatible with at least GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS but has only been tested on GNU/Linux. You'll need SFML, EO and Glu to build it.


• Please send us your remarks and comments.!

Also, I'd like to thanks OpenGameArt and the artists that contribute it, without them our game would probably had hand-drawing art, and we suck at it. (Also many thanks to ozzed who did the music on Jamendo)

Official website: GeneticInvasion   Controls for playin the game