Monday, December 19, 2011

Ludum Dare, Game Jams and Licenses

Olofson's LD22 game

Free, open source licenses are underrepresented at game jams and contests.

This weekend's Ludum Dare ends in a few hours and it already counts 754 entries. The following authors mentioned open source licenses in the context of the compo/jam:



lonekitty


Here are some non-submission projects discovered on Ludum Dare:


A *lot* of other submissions use GitHub but have no license info. :(

I found above projects using this advanced Google search. Hopefully, there will be more results in a few hours, which would mean another blog post.

kragniz' in-progress

Here's a quick list of ideas how free licenses could get more attention in such events.
  • Organizers could recommend free code and asset licenses
  • Developers could offer porting non-cross-platform submissions in exchange for release under free licenses
  • Participating developers, who already use free licenses, could advertise these in blog posts and announcements (more)
The Global Game Jam for example requires use of the CC-BY-NC-SA license, which unfortunately is non-free though.

Let us know of any freely licensed game jam/competition entries which we didn't cover!