Liberating my assets

When I first started with Hypnagonia, I had a bad case of what is colloquially known as “programmer art”. This means that all my GUI and Card illustration, design and so on, where whatever I could scrounge up from openclipart or make using godot builtin nodes. And given that I have close to 0 visual talent and no collaborators, the early releases looked like utter shite.

This has the unfortunate result that while the game mechanics might be interesting, the overall presentation turns people off immediately as it makes things difficult to parse. This makes the game appear way more complex than it is and thus frustrating players who are not already experienced with the genre.

This was a common theme among all my friends who I begged to try out the game for feedback. Most were completely lost (the lack of tutorial didn’t help either), even if they were familiar with deckbuilders.

This in turn creates a vicious circle, where lack of players means less word-of-mouth, means less chance to potentially reach the ears of someone out there who can help me fix the design.

So, after weeks of fruitless search for design collaborators, in desperation I turned to bought assets. I found a card-game design set of something which kinda fits my theme and bought it with a license that allows use for this game only. It was not a perfect match for my needs, so it took some work to onboard, but it immediately made the game look 100 times better. At around the same time I discovered the invaluable Game-icons.net which allowed me to replace keywords with icons sharing a consistent theme.

The results were impressive. Now when showing the game on social media, I had people actually commenting that it looked interesting. People started making whole playthroughs and I started getting some collborator interest. I even had people streaming the game!

As I kept improving upon the game though, the question of the bought assets kept bothering me. It meant that while the game code itself was truly Free/Libre Software, the game as a package wasn’t, as technically someone couldn’t take the game as a whole, modify it and redistribute it along with its assets. Technically the art license allowed me to redistribute the game in distros, but maybe I was wrong. It was a whole legal headache I didn’t want to deal with.

Fortunately, after a while @TornioDuva stepped up and volunteered a fresh card-front for my needs, which meant a big reason for buying the asset pack was resolved. However I still had other assets I needed to get rid off. One big one was the generic art I was using when I had no illustration for the card.

So today, I am happy to announce that I have managed to excise all non-free assets from the game. With the help of the wonderful Marablack I finally have a replacement generic illustration (not to mention all the other amazing illustrations she’s been providing)

All assets now in the game are either public domain or some version of Creative Commons. This means that all artistic effort done to improve Hypnagonia, not only improves the game, but it enriches the whole of the commons!