itch.io

A quick question indeed, but my answer turned out a bit wordy!

TL;DR: Yes, copy and paste the licence into a licence file—but also have somewhere in your documentation, or in the files themselves, where you say “<file> is under <licence>”.

The full version…

The organisations that publish these licences have more specific guidance, and I’m no lawyer, so I recommend you look at what they have to say. But based on experience and what I usually see, you need two things: a licence statement and the licence text.

The statement is somewhere where you tell people that this file is under that licence. For text files, like source code, you can put the statement in the file itself, usually in a comment. For non-text files (or text files that don’t support comments, or for short text files you don’t want to clutter up with a licence statement), you can put it in the README or other documentation instead. Just be sure to clearly identify which files are under which licence. You can also put a licence statement into a file’s metadata, but that’s a bit more technical, both to do and to read—I wouldn’t count on users seeing a licence statement there.

What the statement says depends on the licence. For Creative Common licences, it can be pretty free-form; their licence chooser generates text like the first example below, but they have an “About CC Licenses” page that gives the second example.

• <Title of work> by <author> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
• © 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.

(Personally I’d go with something more like the first one, though I do like to use the abbreviations like “CC BY-SA” etc. I say that because part of the licence is that people using your work need to give you credit, so I think you should be clear about how you want to be credited.)

For the GNU GPL, they have a fairly specific guide on how to apply the GPL to your work. The licence statement basically has two parts:

1. An accurately dated copyright statement (e.g. “Copyright © 2022 Fan22”)
2. Three paragraphs that you can copy and paste from their page, starting with “This program is free software…”. (There’s an alternative, slightly longer version for works spanning multiple files, basically replacing “this program” with its name instead.)

As for the licence text, you can include a complete copy of the text with your work, as you described. The GPL recommends doing this, in a file called COPYING. Other licences are often found in a file called LICENSE. (If you go this route but have different licences for different parts, I recommend giving the files more descriptive names! Or I suppose you could put every licence’s text in one big file.)

Alternatively, you can link to somewhere that recipients can read it online—CC licences are usually done this way, with the link pointing to the Creative Commons website. (CC’s licence chooser generates the right link for you.)

A final note: Websites where you publish your work—including both GitHub and itch.io—often want you to list the licence on the work’s page. Itch.io lets you choose separate code and asset licences, which is great. As far as I can tell, GitHub will try and detect what licence you’re using based on a LICENCE or COPYING file, and it’ll only list one. I wouldn’t worry too much; the information you write in your files is still the authoritative word on what licence you’re granting people.

You can have separate licences for your code and for your assets—that’s a very common thing to do. Just include a clear statement of what licence applies to what materials.

To tell people they can use, copy, and build on your work, but only for non-commercial purposes, you might use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licence. If you don’t want them building on it, but only sharing it as-is, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence may suit you.

(Note that CC licences aren’t recommended for use on software. You might instead choose a share-alike/copyleft licence, like the GNU GPL. This doesn’t forbid commercial use of your work, but it does make it difficult, because it’s hard to charge money for something you can get for free elsewhere! Or you could find a licence made for the purpose—I don’t know any off the top of my head, but I’m sure they exist.)

If you don’t want to give people permission to use your assets separate from your game, you can say exactly that, or use stock wording like “All rights reserved”.

My attempt at dot art also seemed to eat up RAM and resulted in an out-of-memory error. Pity, I was enjoying it and this is a fantastic idea. (Web version, Firefox, Win10.)

Yeah, that’s a good one. Thanks for having a look!

Just down the road from Duckbrake, yeah?

I’d love to see anything that was inspired by a name from this generator! Thanks for your kind comment.

The comments are what matter to me more. Thank you for yours!

Yeah, it was always going to be a bit of an awkward fit in the ratings phase, but I’m really grateful for the kind words.

Okay, “Buttreek” is a classic!

As for maps: the original impetus was something like that, and I would absolutely love to see it happen.

Thank you very much!

I’m glad you liked it. “Whimsical” wasn’t necessarily the original aim, but it certainly seemed to end up dominating the results! Probably it was just through sheer variety of combinations—more of them ended up sounding silly rather than serious.

Thank you very much!

Yeah, it was an odd fit for the jam. Thanks for the kind words—I care more about them than about the ratings!

Sword? Spell? Alchemy?

Gun.

I played this way back when it was submitted before the jam ended, and then almost forgot to come back and rate it! I love the concept, the execution, the music. This is a fantastic game. Well done.

A great one-button game. I agree that some more variety in obstacles could be interesting and add to the game’s longevity, but it has a great deal of minimalist charm as it is right now.

I still haven’t finished the game, but with ratings closing soon I guess I’d better say something!

The whole style of the game, both visual and auditory, sets the mood really well. The simple—dare I say it, MS Paint-looking—graphics say “placeholder art”, but I wouldn’t want them replaced with anything too fancy; they add a certain humour to the game. The voiceovers are great, and my only audio complaint is that there isn’t more sound outside those lines—ambient sounds, background music, etc. The voiceovers could do with transcripts/captions, too.

Yes, the interface is peculiar, but I actually found it a really interesting way to play. Whether I’d come to like to more or less over the longer term, I don’t know.

That… is something I hadn’t even thought of. I’m absolutely going to see if I can make that a thing after the jam is over.

Thanks!

This is a nice platformer, decently put together. It feels quite sluggish, though… my buddy Oro is very slow-moving!

A really interesting idea, but I found it nearly impossible to make any progress. Controlling the character is very awkward and sensitive, and the game didn’t recognise my USB gamepad… not that I’m sure it would’ve been any better than the keyboard controls. (I’ll add that the default controls made no sense to me. I replaced them with A/D for left/right and arrow keys for hook control.)

The hook seems to hinder more than help, as it’s hard to aim precisely—plus it reels you in nigh-instantly, and then it seems you just fall down wherever it brought you, with no mid-air manoeuvrability to correct your positioning (or else it just happens so quickly that it seems like you can’t correct).

It’s a fun little exploration game, but it’s not at all clear, when starting, what you’re meant to do.

My first couple of games ended with running out of fuel, with seemingly no way I could’ve avoided it. My third game, I found plenty of fuel, but still wasn’t sure what I was meant to be doing. Then I happened to get my prestige over 100 and I “won”, which was a surprise!

With that done, I played again, got my currency over 100, and got another ending. Now I guess I’d better seek out an ending with 100 firepower!

I know it’s a prototype, so I hope to see more of a sense of purpose as it develops.

I’ll also add, the map gets pretty confusing very quickly if you move about in the same area, since it’s always adding new branches with new worlds and never connecting back to previously generated ones.

This is a lovely game. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m really curious to see where the story goes.

I will say, it’s often unclear where you’re meant to be going, or which specific space at the edge of the screen takes you to the next section. And in the second town, what I thought were bushes were… actually doormats?

Also: level 57? Wagon is OP.

PS I don’t know why nobody’s rated it before me, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s because you haven’t marked it with what platforms it’s for?

“Did the game have atmosphere or make you feel something?”

*mashes five stars*

Yes. It made me feel… seen.

Man, I remember this game being tough, but not this tough! I keep getting groups of landers spawning right near me and shooting me just as I get lined up to shoot them. Quality remake.

An entertaining little game! I liked the music, although it got a bit repetitive after a while.

The game balance is very unstable—you either get so far ahead that you’re utterly untouchable, or fall so far behind that you run in fear and have to slowly, painstakingly work your way up.

A great variation on Snake. Well done for thinking of it!

I could never quite tell if I was moving at the same speed as the snake or not. That also made me wonder whether “skipping” snake segments was a bad idea that would bring me to my doom sooner, or a necessary tactic to keep up!

This was really interesting, but also somewhat hard to follow. I think it needs to have indicators in the game (not just on the page below it) of what the bars mean.

Also, it gets stuck at “game over”—there didn’t seem to be a way to play again, short of refreshing the page.

A cute, but glitchy game. My spells never seemed to do anything to the slimes. And even fullscreen, parts of the game ran off the edges of my screen.

This is a lovely, chill version of Snake, with great graphics and sound. The clouds obscuring parts of the playing field—more and more so in later levels—is a nice touch.

I wasn’t entirely sure how the scoring works; it seems to be that the faster you get to the next coin, the more points it’s worth?

If I had one criticism of the visuals, it’s that the portal looks a little bit… Eye of Sauron.

A nice TD game—I really enjoyed playing it. It got a bit slow in the early 30s when my turrets were able to keep the tanks pinned down at the entrance. I also didn’t realise that the crates could be clicked on!

A few minor points: The graphics are glitchy, not always playing the animations to show when turrets are firing. It’s not clear what some upgrades do or how they differ from each other (range upgrades, DPS vs damage/fire rate, etc.)

Great visual choices and level design! But I had a hard time getting into it, with the controls not seeming to act consistently. Sometimes I had to hit Jump again to start climbing a wall when I jumped at it; sometimes I’d grab it automatically and hitting Jump again would fling me off. The jump distance always varied and I couldn’t figure out how to control it.

A fantastic idea with good execution. Some of the levels get quite frustrating when you get sent back to the start, so I thought a checkpoint system would be a good idea… and then I noticed it was included in the Assist Mode!

This was fun, but a bit too easy in that I could snipe enemies at the edge of the screen without them reacting to me. I also never encountered any additional souls to rescue past the start screen.

I think it’s a really good foundation that I’d love to see you keep developing!

Cute and fun little game. While (as others have said) it definitely needs some balancing, I did enjoy testing out different approaches. For instance, while a band of archers is really slow to get going and lets the goblins get a lot of hits in early, they start demolishing the enemy tower from about halfway across the screen!

This was a lot of fun! Like others, I didn’t notice armour moving at all, so my combined-arms tactics never got off the ground… rushing with multiple cheap squads of varied infantry worked much better!

The camera controls were awkward, though. Panning and tilting are very sluggish, while zooming is just the opposite, moving in too-large jumps.

There’s some nice exploration to be had here, even if it’s apparently a matter of luck whether you reach the end in minutes or never find it at all! A lot of the fun is lost to jumping/falling into enemies, though—especially those spinning spike things, which seem able to hit you several times.

There are other little glitches that would be easily overlooked if the exploration felt more consistent. (The animations stutter a lot. The graphics vary wildly; the player character looks great, but the clouds, not so much… and I’m not even sure why they’re there. The sound effects often seem to have no connection to what’s happening in the game.)

Heaps of fun, once I got the hang of what I was doing!

At first I didn’t realise the red dots were the (only) shots coming from the enemies—I thought the bright white spots were shotgun blasts or something, and so I kept giving the enemies a much wider berth than I needed to. With that out of the way, I was a lot more ready to mix it up with them and things got a lot more exciting.

I also had to come to realise that “three levels” didn’t mean I’d be given a new room or a new wave of enemies once I took out the first lot… I had to go to them.

I think I must’ve skipped the instructions when I first played, because I had no idea how to stay ahead of the wave. Speed up, duh!

“…die if you touch a skull, just like in real life” got a solid laugh out of me, too.

Yes! That’s what it makes me think of! Though I think it was the DOS version that I played…