Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and then program a bunch of free software games that use it.

Liberated Pixel Cup brings together some powerful allies: Creative Commons, Mozilla, OpenGameArt, the Free Software Foundation, and you.

The artwork

Phase one of the competition is to build a set of artwork that's dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3 and stylistically consistent. To that end, have created a style guide which incorporates these components.

As you can see, for this competition we're working on an overhead 16 bit rpg inspired style (technically: front-facing overhead orthographic view) with 32x32 tiles. The selection of this style is intentional: we're trying to build something easy to collaborate upon on which a wide variety of games (overhead shooters, RPGs, adventure games, strategy games) can be built.

When the competition began on June 1st, artists were asked to make artwork that matches this existing style and upload to OpenGameArt.org under the forementioned licenses. These entries are now archived here. Winners will be selected on judgements of quality, how well they match the style guide, etc. Phase one runs from June 1st thru June 30th. For more information, check out the rules.

The games

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. Participants will be judged based on fun factor, innovativeness, and of course how well they incorporate assets built for the contest. Phase two runs from July 1st thru July 31st.

Please note that for a game to qualify as a contest entry, it must compile and run on 100% free (as in freedom) software from the ground up.

You!

Liberated Pixel Cup will be awesome, but it can't happen without the help of people like you!

We're paying artists for comissions on the artwork for the initial style guide, and we'd like to give away prizes for those who win the competition. You can help make this project all the more awesome with your donation!

This competition also needs people like you to enter and do awesome things with it. Interested in taking part? Read up more here and join us at #liberatedpixelcup on irc.freenode.net (click here to chat from your browser)! The admins and judges can be reached for questions on the official forum as well.

For updates, follow OpenGameArt on identi.ca or Twitter.

LPC Sponsors

Creative Commons is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute and make specific uses of it. Donations to support Creative Commons work can be made at https://creativecommons.net/donate/ and also by contacting development@creativecommons.org.

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Mozilla is a non-profit whose sole purpose is to fight for a good and open Web. They are passionate about games that are created with open Web technologies. They are also invested in many projects that are improving their Firefox platform in ways that will directly benefit game developers, like introducing the Gamepad API and launching an open apps eco-system.

Their developer documentation site, the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), is an open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Anyone can contribute and each person who does helps makes the Web more open and stronger.

OpenGameArt.org was founded in 2009 for the purpose of archiving art for use in free and open source games. Since then, OGA has grown into a vibrant community of artists and developers who are passionate about games and free culture. You can join the community or explore by visiting http://opengameart.org.