Devlog Busy Week - PAX, No Mario's Sky, Butcher, Site Update

Since it'd be a shame for this to only be in a profile post to monkey_feats, modders will now be able to spawn as many pixel particles as they like (up to the engine limit), which is useful if you want to do things like particle "rain", pixel fire effects, and so on.

Here's a thousand. There's 2048 available.

 

@FunATuns if you're implying we somehow missed the takedown?

 

Aww, they said "Dear" tho, they do care ;)

The image is probably cropped and it actually says "Love, Nintendo" at the bottom

 

It's actually sent to itch.io support, not us.

Honestly that'd probably be better achieved with animated particles instead of pixels, but I guess so.

You can see it in full here; looks like it was indeed cropped somewhat. https://itch.io/takedowns/82746

@FunATuns - I can't read your mind. Randomly tagging me in week old news doesn't imply "I want to hear your opinion".

I've talked about it elsewhere but basically I think nintendo is reasonably heavy handed about fan projects but are within their rights on the projects they're taking down. Interesting that they used a DMCA here though when we actually had no nintendo assets in-game -> it's trademark infringement, not copyright, but I'm not a lawyer.

People seem to be treating it like it's a new thing with the recent takedowns of AM2R, Pokemon Uranium, ~500 games on Gamejolt and probably hundreds more across other portals (as well as NMarS) but as far as I'm aware they've always done this; zelda, mario, metroid fangames are pretty much universally taken down.

We're not really fused with it happening to NMarS because we didn't spend much time on it; I imagine it'd be pretty devastating to those working on much longer projects, but they should have kind of seen it coming, working on a nintendo IP fangame in the first place.

 

Yeah I kind of get the sense that once the games are "out there" that's good enough for the creators. I don't see why they'd make them otherwise, it seems like a weird plan to try to make money with a fangame. If that's their angle they can put the work in and convert it to a new thing that's inspired by whatever ip it was a fan game for in the first place, like Freedom Planet.

I think it's a good thing when the devs get hit with the copyright stuff after the game is done, so then Nintendo gets to protect their ip, but the game still exists.

 

The reason I bring up the trademark/copyright distinction is that we didn't use any of their actual assets.
They don't have a copyright on pictures we've drawn - the audio was a potential issue because it was transcribed pretty much directly from some sheet music of "the mario theme" we found, but again was rendered by us, not ripped.

If it's a trademark, not copyright claim, as far as I'm aware that's not actually what the DMCA is about and using it for a takedown might not be legit, but I'm not about to spend thousands on investigating a 3 day jam game.

I've got a feeling they just felt it "infringed enough" for there to probably be a legal problem they could pin to us if we took it to court, and lean pretty hard on the fact that they've got much more money and a whole legal team happy to play hardball.

Again, I'm not a lawyer so "I don't know" :)

There's indeed a lot of ways to approach it ;) I think nintendo's culture of aggressively pursing anything in this area probably comes from their history; video game crash came from low-quality knock-off games and they overcame that with the nintendo seal of quality and being meticulous as all get out with who could make games for their consoles; especially for their first-party IP. It's not nearly as relevant these days, I feel, but unless there's some high-profile push back against it that actually wins, I doubt anything will change there.

I guess, but not being able to distribute it officially means that they'll likely not get nearly as much recognition or reach as they might otherwise. In some cases these fan games have been in dev for almost a decade, and imo it's a shame for that work to be "flushed" basically immediately on release.