Game! Licensing

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benpaulthurston
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Game! Licensing

Post by benpaulthurston »

I've read through all the news and have kind of grasped the level of time commitment involved in getting game! as polished as it is now. My question is, have you licensed all the source in any way? How would you feel about game! clones? on a different note, did you ever play Usurper? I used to play that back in the old pre-internet bbs days. It was a pretty funny rpg, in its own way. I came across game! from a comment you made on slashdot about game! and indie development. enjoying it a ton
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Mad Merlin
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Post by Mad Merlin »

The licensing question has come up a few times before. Ultimately, I plan to keep Game! closed source for a few reasons. The main reason is that I think (for many people) a lot of the fun in playing is to actually go through and discover everything (combinations, cooking recipes, how each pet works, etc), and that experience would be easily lost if anyone could discover those things simply by looking at the source. Having said that, I have considered open sourcing Game!, but even if I did, I wouldn't include the data in the database along with it (but rather just some sample data).

I haven't really given a lot of thought to the possibility of clones, mainly because I haven't seen any yet, but imitation is indeed the sincerist form of flattery.

As for Usurper, I hadn't heard of it until now.
benpaulthurston
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oh

Post by benpaulthurston »

I hadn't considered that particular reason for keeping it closed source, that people might use it to discover, say, new recipes. I was thinking more of people who would be interested in the code for developing an online rpg (witty or otherwise lol) That type of person would probably be more interested in the layout of the database rather than what you have the values set at. As for the clones question, I mean if someone had the source they could change the theme, the artwork, and so on but keep the general functionality. maybe clones not the word, derivative or something I don't know. it seems to me it might be a lot of work scrubbing the info particular to game! out of the code though. if you licensed it open source with copyleft maybe you'd get some interesting code from people who built off of your code. Oh, and more about Usurper, I couldn't believe it but that project is still around and to tie it in with the previous topic, on the forum theres a lot of people interested in a gpl'd version. thanks for your reply and any further thoughts on the subject, I'm interested because I've released some code open source, my problem was people weren't very interested but I don't think you'd have that one.
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Mad Merlin
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Post by Mad Merlin »

As far as changing the look of Game! (skinning is probably the word you're looking for), you could do a great deal of that just by modifying the CSS file, that's where 99% of the styling is already.

As for the code, I suspect anyone other than me wouldn't find it all that valuable. It's not an especially large or complicated codebase (~7k lines of php, ~1.3k lines of css and ~1.2k lines of js right now). To be honest, creating all of the content was substantially more work than all of the coding, and the content isn't reusable in the same way that code is.

It's worth noting that both the Javascript and the CSS are completely visible to everyone who cares to look, but I've yet to see a single patch for either. In comparison, Game!'s art heritage is twisted through nearly a dozen different people (though Kariloy has done the large majority of it). It's not an entirely fair comparison, because the art has obvious gaping holes that basically anyone (that can grip a pencil) can fill, while the Javascript and CSS are invisible to most, and sprawling jibberish to most of the rest.
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