Stercus's Forum Posts

  • 8 posts
  • I'm developing a game and would like to have someone help out with the art. I've been doing walkabout graphics and some backdrops, but help would speed up the process and take off some of the stress out of having to do everything myself. Financial compensation a possibility regarding portions of the work I am unable to do. A continued relationship is something more likely. I've been working diligently on the mechanics of the game and art holds me up a lot.

    Contact me here on this thread, via PM, or email me . Thanks!

  • I was waiting in hopes for you to falsify my wiki link. Wikipedia is a website where people take their education from outside sources and put them on the inside. I have a few friends who have a similar standpoint on life, the universe, and everything with snowballed philosophies of half thought truths of aimless doubt. The difference here is that you and I met on a middleware forum. If you do not see the irony in that without further explanation, it would not surprise me. I've spent enough time in court to tell you that when you get there it plays out like a game where the rules may seem somewhat subjective, but that does not mean there is no substance. You don't read a wiki article and become enlightened, but there is no shame in starting there and finding the appropriate sources.

    I will not argue Wikipedia's stance further, I am well aware of the rigid validity and that knowledge is assumed to all readers and writers.

    I will not steer the topic into senseless nitpicking. The point is made.

    I will not further defend law from fantasy impressions. I have provided example, clarification, simplification, sources, and inspiration to research of its diversity and existence.

    I will not argue that I have done less than solid on any of my points to anyone who doesn't demonstrate having at least tried to see what I mean.

    That having been said, I would respond to a solid standpoint or an honest curious question about a grey area. Further spam and banter of this thread would be spam.

  • These replies are rather extensive, but your tree bears no fruit, Goury. "Intellectual Property" is the term to generalize and sum up all of the above on legal ownership rights on things of non substance. The topic is extensive and only gets longer when you include more angles like types of rights and what countries they come out of. Ultimately, if you want to be positive, do your own research: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_intellectual_property

    The purpose of the question in this thread is to ask someone at least somewhat knowledge to cut some of the fat and clarify what you should be afraid of when tapping into possible property rights. What I wanted to say (in a way which was very clear, descriptive, and used many examples) was go ahead and make a Mario, Sonic, Smash Brothers, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Zelda, et cetra. Just don't use any of the names, audio, or ripped graphics. I also wanted to include that infringing is not always illegal and even when it is, the instances which the owner may not care anyway.

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  • It has been long enough that this is probably unlawful thread necromancy, but I feel this thread has left the subject detrimental and may wane people from doing this which they could do in fear of legal action. I'm not a lawyer as anyone before, but I'm legally conscious. Laws are made to protect, not attack. You will never have a law suit that costs you money unless you terrorize, slander, or charge someone else money for something which you shouldn't have charged them for.

    Using Construct 2 you will almost never have to fear someone attacking you for patent unless you rip off someone else's Construct 2 game. If you make a game just like Mario or Sonic, but implement all your own features, graphics, and orientation using Construct 2, you will be totally okay. In recent law, the obvious copycat Samsung Galaxy S3 tablet was under fire from the iPad3. Apple lost the case in the UK because tablets are now generic, and the two methods were considered different enough even though the intended market and goal were identical.

    If you're using Trademark or characters in any way that isn't gaining you financial profit or slandering them, you will almost never have a law suit. If the owner of the Trademark decides to flex their muscles, they can order a seize and desist followed by court order if you don't follow through with their demands(and if they can find you-- if you upload your game to a web server like Scirra's site, they would get the seize and desist, and Scirra would undoubtedly comply and privately notify you what happened. If you don't take credit for your work, the credit falls onto the host). There may be literally a thousand Mario flash games on the internet which Nintendo could easily get rid of. The reason they still exist consistently and multiply is that it's flattering, good advertising, and cheaper for Nintendo to not hire someone to take care of it. If something graphic depicting Mario characters got in the news, they might do something about it, but System Every Tick-> 'noharm'='nofoul'. On this same subject, in my six degrees of separation table, I know a girl who was helping work with a guy that was making a Halo mod for Counter Strike Source. The intention was to take the Source Engine and make it as much like Halo as possible. Including that one of their members ripped the models and textures off of the Halo 2 disc and they were using the characters and vehicles as a part of their project. When the project got big, Microsoft ordered them to stop on account of the fact that they were making a game which could not be told apart from Halo 2 on a free engine and it could cut into future sales if there was a free version of it that you could get so long as you had the source engine on your computer. What this team was doing was an obvious ripoff, and months of work had been lost, but there was no lawsuit or financial damage.

    Case in point, technically, a Trademark prevents you from blatantly using features from another company, but most of the time a big name company won't care unless you garner a serious amount of attention and you may be harmful. If I made a hack n' slash game, and then you made a hack n' slash game with my main character as one of the bosses, I would be flattered. I would be bothered, however, if that character was the selling point of the game, you were making money on it, and it wasn't discussed with me first. If I were a big name company and you were getting a lot of attention for my property, I would probably do something about it. Otherwise, knock your socks off! There's a lot of discretion involved with law, and not a whole lot someone can do to you financially if you're not making money.

    My last big example(I promise) is South Park. They always request permission for their uses of celebrity names and media influences, and they don't always get it. Everyone knows what the episode of Chimpokomon was about, but it was in good parody(and not necessarily slanderous). Saying 'but yeah, everyone laughs at South Park', is not true. I don't laugh at South Park. I can see why anyone would find it offensive and not want to be involved with it. South Park makes a lot of money, and will make fun of whatever they want careful about what is legal and what isn't with the use of disclaimer. Parody is fair use, free to play games built around similar ideals is fair use, slander is not, ripping off hard work is not. There's a game on XBox Live Arcade called Angry Fish which is a shameless ripoff of you-know-what and costs a buck. It's still there. Sony's obvious Smash Brother's ripoff is the first Smash Brother's clone that's coming to America(!'thefirstmade') because in Japan Smash Brother's has been out long enough that it can legally be considered a genre now.

    Chances are pretty slim that you won't run into the legal issue on pretty much any regard, but there are obvious reasons why you could. Being original on characters and art will pretty much keep you covered. Concepts are considered generic after you can name three games that do what you want. Small features that you take will go unnoticed to most people, and, most of all remember: to take ideas from one source is called plagiarism, but taking ideas from a group of people is called research!

    Edit:I should note that this point is mostly American law, but internationally it seems to stand in most cases. the first example with the iPad and the Galaxy Tab is a funny one now that I checked my sources. The Galaxy Tab has been banned for sale in America, although Apple didn't win any money on it. It's legal to sell in the UK though, on account of the iPad "being cooler". Weird.

  • In my personal experience, I've only been able to make the text disappear off of the top layer if I request that it itself goes invisible as its own command. I've been using Chrome and Firefox mostly, not sure if there was some sort of incompatibility, but my workaround of telling it to disappear manually has worked for me in similar instances thusfar.

  • I'm very excited to get into using this, but unfortunately, my game model is not ready to be exported into a playable demo (As I've only put about 12 hours into it thusfar). I'm praying that development is rapidly continuing on this as it has been and will be more familiar to the engine when I have something that I can run. Keep up the great work, guys!

  • I'm new here, so I'm not sure about my posting boundaries, but I would love to just interject that I am very excited for the streamlining of the multiplayer aspect for Construct 2. I began doing the outlining on my first big project and it turns out that it may rely heavily on multiplayer and it will be worlds better if it can be more than just local. Everywhere I have looked for real info on Construct 2 and Multiplayer has wound me back to Taurian's work, so a special thanks to him. I'm looking forward to seeing the knots hammered out of the deal and implemented into a future update. This was the make/break decision that will have me developing for Construct.

  • Howdy!

    I'm new here(obviously), and also new to Construct 2. I'm embarking on quite the quest with a few of my companions to make a game on this engine. I consider the project simple, but looking around here, maybe not so much. I'm going to have various questions as we venture down the road of design, and I know the blueprints of the project in mind are going to have quite a few alterations on account of both limitations of the engine and, on the flip side, advantages I hadn't considered in the rough draft. I'm hoping there is an active community here to support my concerns while roughing up the engine. My biggest upfront concern at this moment is multiplay: in my poking around, I didn't see a whole lot of multiplaying conveniences, and I'm starting to sweat having to limit the simultaneous multiplay to local and hard-coded.

    So give me a heads up! <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • 8 posts