Making Indie Games with Public Domain Content

[Music] thank you first of all my name is Chris Totten I will go over who I am in a second but I want to start with a little intro so let's say you want to find a way for your indie game to stand out from other games around it but you want a unique piece of inspiration or maybe your dream is to work with a famous intellectual property that you're a fan of but you want to know which version you can use spoiler alert it's not the one with the red shirt don't do it maybe you're a small team or you have little money uh and you need to get creative with how you Source assets uh this is me trying to make music what if I told you

that these were things that media outside of games have had figured out for decades centuries even and this gets into some really awesome stuff that I wish games would frankly do more of uh so that's why today we're going to talk about making Indie Games with public domain content so first of all like I promised who am I uh so my name is Christopher Totten I am an assistant professor and I am the lead faculty for Kent State University's animation game design program in Ohio uh Ohio um I am founder and creative director of Team Nemo our latest project as team Nemo is a hand animated uh you know non-linear platformer called Little Nemo and the nightmare fiends I also have a small personal studio called pie for breakfast studio and the latest game for that is a tabletop storytelling game

based on Don Quixote called La Mancha I am one of the founders of the Smithsonian American Art Museum arcade and I have written several books on game design level design animation art Etc we are here today to talk about public domain so first of all what even is that well public domain is all of the creative work to which no intellectual property exclusivity rights apply in layman's terms that means they are not protected by copyright law you can use public domain materials in your own work or as the basis of whole projects now before I move on a disclaimer I am not a lawyer and if you are in doubt about a work please consult an intellectual property attorney so as long as you all

understand that I am not a lawyer uh you know we can move on but in general and I got these uh these are available uh and they update every year on copyright.cornell.edu public domain the copyright terms for Works published in the following years assuming uh that you are filing the work for copyright uh these terms are after 1978 it is the life of the author plus 70 years between 1964 and 1977 95 years after publication between 1927 and 1963 if during that period the copyright holder renewed the copyright the term is 95 years after publication if that copyright was not renewed in that time it's public domain

and if a work is from 1926 and earlier completely in the public domain but even with all this you still need to do your homework some works are in the public domain such as many of Edgar Rice burrough's books about Tarzan but companies still extend their rights using trademark law you can for example use Tarzan as a character in stories as Dynamite comics did throughout the 2010s in their lord of the Jungle series but you cannot call it Tarzan and you cannot have Tarzan or Tarzan and Jane or other Associated terminology in the title it's all listed there there's their trademark statement um because Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated still holds trademarks on Tarzan the brand so Tarzan character public domain Tarzan brand trademarked

so beyond just defining these terms for you I wanted to talk about what it's like using this material in a game what some of the considerations and what some of the cool things like artistic things you end up doing when you create uh public domain games are and so that is why I'm going to talk for the rest of the talk about opportunities that you have with public domain uh how to use public domain assets and what it's like using public domain assets in your games and also working with public domain intellectual property so first of all why do this why use public domain well the short answer is that it's free but that's that's a pretty good answer actually I mean I could just talk over no um no in all reality um let's talk about some of the cool cultural things you do when you work with works in the public domain so we're going to talk about one

of my favorite cartoons of all time what's Opera Doc and if you are not familiar with this one or don't know it by name this is the queue dawab it one so it's from 1957 and uh you know we can through this we can look at how public domain artworks change their popular understanding over time the cartoon in which Elmer Fudd as Siegfried hunts Bugs Bunny who then tricks Siegfried by impersonating his beloved brunhilda is based on elements of Wagner's ring cycle originally performed throughout the 1870s one of the most famous songs from the series of operas The Ride of the Valkyries also appears in the film Apocalypse Now which has led you know and this song through this movie became associated with helicopters and destruction and you know whenever you have a big fight scene you often hear and this led to parodies and pastiches

of this scene including one in Far Cry 3. okay so let's look at this cultural lineage here you see all of these Works use the same piece of music The Ride of the Valkyries which at the time of what's Opera Doc was in the public domain so in images music and other sound enter the public domain they can be adapted and changed over time through repeated use repeated adaptation repeated recontextualization and could be cultural references that create particular moods or feelings in a work and those moods or feelings that we associate them can change and when you use these things in a work you can change those moods or there's those associations so some can even become so iconic that they add new elements to the legacy of the work as an Apocalypse Now now the song is familiar with perhaps not the most wonderful of things but you know war and destruction and things like that

but which led to the scene in Far Cry 3. um being able to complete but it's not just a pop culture reference you get to complete the nod by including the original piece of music and you could do the same thing too you can use right of the Valkyries right now today in your own work here's a link to a public domain recording of it from 1921 I'm going to pause so anybody who's interested could take a picture of this slide please let me know if the link still works so this brings us to the use though of public domain assets so here's a game it's a rather good game I like a lot four last things by Joe Richardson and even it even has a sequel It's a point-and-click adventure game made from art clipped from Renaissance paintings actually put into Photoshop clipped out of Renaissance paintings and turned into assets for the game the source of the artwork and the Monty Python style humor

make for a really unique piece of art that has been honored with Awards and placement on lists of innovative games we put it in Sam arcade we were super excited to receive it as a submission here's a screenshot from one of my own games liziski's Revenge which was based on the work of 1920s graphic designer elizitzki I was able to make the art assets myself because I'm mainly a visual artist but I had trouble finding good music for the game on the usual sites like freesound.org and others so I turned to a website that tracked the history of music from the era and had a number of recordings from the era that liziski was making his posters that were also in the public domain since they were older recordings they also had a nice record scratch to them which led to a lot of nice texture to the game which I really appreciated now like with properties I should note that when you are dealing with assets

like music also with photos or photos of paintings things like that um a piece like right of the Valkyries may be in the public domain but a performance or a recording of that piece may not be so always make sure that when you are sourcing assets you are using public domain versions of the of the piece that's why that link had a 1921 recording it's in the public domain now for my game getting public domain music saved me a ton of money it saved me some time but you should note that that still didn't make making games easy there was still a lot of other non-music parts of the game to make such as artwork doing level design uh scripting the thing doing sound design all that other stuff um also finding the right tracks was not an instantaneous process that took time some there were great recordings that

were not in the public domain and there were some public domain ones that didn't quite fit the mood I was going for uh so I would say that finding the right piece of music for each level still took about two weeks uh for this game's three-month cycle so in terms of proportion that's still quite a bit of time so you know make sure that you plan for that if you are going to Source Assets in this way okay now to the really good stuff how do I make games based on public domain IP so let's Return to Oz no no no no don't Return to Oz it's copyrighted there we go so the original Oz books were written by L frank Baum between 1900 and 1919. which if you're keeping score puts them all squarely in the public domain and this is why you get so many interpretations of Oz by current authors this is why there is that period like a few years ago where there was like three Oz movies out at the same time

you know it's not only that this is a beloved and well-remembered intellectual property it's also that you don't have to pay licensing fees for that but think about the works that have emerged because of this uh if anybody's read Wicked it's quite an amazing book it's quite an amazing reinterpretation of this universe uh and all because it's working with public domain work now again I cannot reiterate this enough if you are doing this make sure you do not take elements specifically associated with copyrighted derivative works such as for example with Oz the 1939 MGM film which copy which Warner Brothers owns currently so keep the slippers silver not Ruby just like with Winnie the Pooh don't put a shirt on him these are distinctions you want to make but if you can do that you yes you could make an oz game like city-state entertainment did in 2012 with march to

Oz you could have an oz game with right of the Valkyries in it why not I don't know if that would quite fit but you know or did you know that George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain you can watch it free on YouTube and it's completely legal so due to a failure to issue a renewed statement of copyright by its original distributor the film is in the public domain Indie developer Sultan pixel knows this and is making an amazing looking prequel to the movie for Game Boy in the GB Studio engine you know that's the wonderful thing about public domain you can add to this story add to this this setting so as you can probably guess public domain stuff and I've mentioned this is a big part of my practice my two most recent games are a tabletop storytelling game based on uh Don Quixote called La Mancha Don Quixote is a novel from 1605 very public domain uh and my latest

project is called Little Nemo and the nightmare fiends based on the 1905 Comic Strip by animation and Comics Pioneer Windsor McKay and here's why I like to use this content first of all again free cannot emphasize this enough it's free you can do it um but beyond that first of all is that if a work has existed this long and people are still aware of it it has a built-in audience and that built-in audience may actually exist Beyond gaming so yes sure you're going to have fans of it and maybe those there have been some you know adaptations over the years like with the limo um where that people may still remember but you also then maybe have audience members who are in the associated field like so you know with Don Quixote people

who are interested in literature with Little Nemo people who are interested in comics and the history of comics uh you may also have people like teachers or historians film bus uh Librarians things like that so you have gateways into new audiences that you may not have had with you know something more commercial game uh you know Centric and this leads to more opportunities to show your game ever show your game in an art museum talk to me later I can hook you up but you know this show offers you opportunities to show your game at venues like art museums uh libraries you know bookstores other places that are new opportunities to get your game in front of people beyond the usual convention circuit so I always get this really important question is this fan art technically yes um these are things of that I am a fan

of and I made work based on them but I can distribute these things on marketplaces and promote them in ways that I can't always do if I were doing fan art and the art world has a term for this it's called a derivative work which sounds like it's being snobbish to it but really all it means is a creative work that includes major elements of an original uh so this turns into things like parodies or any work that responds to an original work like they do shop work here so as with using public domain assets you know again make sure you sort out the risks involved you know the trademark and and who owns what adaptation and things like that um but when you make a game based on something in the public domain you are creating a new iteration of the original that adds to its cultural footprint that new audiences can consume uh museum

curator Theresa bebnister uses this to make a distinction between Fine Art and Fan Art Fine Art is that which the artist subjects to peer-reviewed uh curatorial process like those found in galleries journals and art museums fan art can certainly show your artistic skill as an artist or could be a good way to show that you can do the pop the job of a commercial artist or illustrator but those processors are very different from curation and preservation that you see in these cultural institutions um and you know it's very different in how commercializing these works is handled because you know ultimately what we're trying to do is do what great art does using intellectual property to say something new with old material we can see this with right of the Valkyries just as I hope we see this with works that maybe some of you will produce after this talk so my background is in architecture and this is something that we're taught in

school we are taught to study precedence to look at cultural Works around us and which came before us to get inspiration or even just to learn how other artists solved problems maybe an artist solved a problem that we're running into maybe they're working in a style that we find appealing maybe we want to make a work that directly reacts to another work or contradicts that work the point is this is stuff that the Arts do and that games aren't always great at and but that we can do better uh you know there is this kind of hang up sometimes about pure originality that other fields don't seem to have maybe it's because games also come from Tech which is concerned with patents and uh you know commercialization based on the patent but as we become more of a fine art we have to get used to this aspect of it and you should do this with your games because other Arts have had this figured out forever there's even a cool book

about it buy this book it's cool I like it um again this by no means makes your work easy making a Don Quixote game allowed me to get lots of positive buzz and funding and talk to some really awesome people uh who study literature but it was still a two-year project including managing overseas manufacturing and shipping which was definitely a new experience for me likewise doing a little Nemo game the right way means lots of research and experimentation to understand Windsor McKay's art style and how to translate that art style into a video game but you know again it also was a great way to get funding to build an audience and and to meet some wonderful people and this is more of a personal thing though but it takes a lot of effort to honor a work properly this is not to say you can't reinterpret or even reinvent Source material and let's be clear given the eras in which these things came out and the problematic things

associated them you probably should reinvent them quite a bit but you should also avoid cheaply slapping the IPS branding onto something that doesn't fit with um so real quick before I wrap up uh a few things I wanted to shout out while I'm here I want to make sure that I mentioned that every year there are folks who are trying to get more public domain and games uh there is a yearly itch.io Jam to make games out of the works that have been fallen into the public domain that year uh go check them out when it rolls around uh next January also the Spanish Ministry of culture has hosted game jams public domain game jams to celebrate cultural works created in Spain those are really cool go learn about them and I also wanted to throw this down um every so often on Twitter somebody says hey but when are they going to make public domain Smash Brothers let's do it I I called Don Quixote and Little Nemo

but like let's do it that would be amazing I would totally collaborate on something like that so to summarize public domain assets and IP are great ways too make unique games get work done use recognizable franchises find fans but making games is still hard remember to use the version that's actually in the public domain remember to read about copyright versus trademark and please please please properly honor the work don't just make a cheap knockoff and that's it for me uh let me know if you have any questions uh and here's just a bunch of nice pictures of Little Nemo we're looking for a publisher if there are any Publishers in the room so thank you [Applause]

um so yeah he's got the right idea uh come up to the mic for questions thank you for the talk um you mentioned the amount of time that it sometimes requires to find the right piece of public domain work do you have any tips for exploring that Universe of stuff okay so the question was uh do I have any tips for exploring the universe of public domain assets uh you know so in terms of the public domain assets first of all again find out whether the recordings on the site are from an era that would be in the public domain check any license information on any resources for example you know I for Little Nemo I go to this site called Comic Strip Library quite a bit and you know I went in and looked at their licensing terms and everything like that because you know if we are pulling artwork from those copies of

Little Nemo we want to make sure everything's covered um so there's that um set a a series of goals and this is really with any asset but set yourself some goals like I said with liziski's Revenge I had a set of goals and I went in and I didn't just kind of like say okay here's what it is do I need to change it I had the ability to say Okay I want these certain qualities you know some you'll find a really rich supply of things sometimes it won't be as rich but you know try to do as much as you can for what you want to accomplish with it um you will maybe sometimes need to go on like outside the beaten path um I don't remember how I found the site with the music that I found but it was definitely not a site that I would have known about beforehand um okay so thank you thank you yes uh hi and thanks for the talk as well I was going to ask a similar question about music in terms of uh you know

essentially a database of public domain uh works if you happen to no one that you're using ah I unfortunately well that's not true um so if you're looking for stuff like to check the copyright status of things Library of Congress that is that is like you know where you will find most of the library information on what is copyrighted and what is not so that's the easiest one to recommend there are some specialty ones like I mentioned the the um you know the music archive that I happened upon for liziski um but you know I think you you kind of have to get into like more deeper targeted searches for stuff like that thank you yep um I would say that I have a game that kind of floats around parody okay and the era of like Little Mermaid um but with the context of Little

Mermaid I kind of have a lot of thematic things that are similar to like the disneyish thing and the sense of how the character looks there's a lot of like like like uh the music kind of has similar things um how much do you feel like leaning on some of these pre-established like contexts and things to like keep that audience that kind of floats around these things how much do you value that over kind of remixing to create your own thing from it so uh this is a the question was um when you are making a work and you're working with a public domain IP how much of a popular adaptation do you try to reach to is am I summarizing this well okay so we actually had to deal with this directly with Little Nemo some of you may know that there is a 1992 Capcom game on the NES based on a 1989 TMS movie of Little Nemo and it has a big following among retro Gamers so we

had a lot of people wondering is our game based on or a sequel to that game um when you are working with these things you absolutely want to stay away from explicit inclusions of stuff Our Little Nemo uh you know I'm going to speak in terms of like stuff from these adaptations does not have a squirrel friend does not um wear animals as suits um it's probably good but you know it doesn't have these elements do we have a frog does that frog like candy yes but it's a visually distinct frog you really need to make sure that anything you include is visually distinct or audio distinct so you want to be careful and if you are wondering consult a lawyer yep I am not a lawyer yep yes so you're an instructor as well Professor can you tell me a little bit

when you introduce this public domain stuff particular into your curriculum a what was the Student Response and B what was the work that the student produced what was that like so when I've used this in the classroom um it's so the question was uh what is the Student Response when I do this in the classroom um students initially struggle with this because sometimes it does pull them out of their boundaries but that's exactly what it's meant to do this is supposed to kind of Jar us out of like just using the same old Inspirations so after some initial teeth gnashing and struggling they eventually get it it also does help that like because I make games with this I can directly demonstrate like here's how I present this here's how I write this up here's how I promoted this um and and then they start to see how it applies to real project or you know not the student projects aren't real uh you know what I mean you know how it applies

to like commercial outward facing projects uh mine is kind the opposite of The Little Mermaid problem is that when you have a public domain things that has been used a lot how do you prevent players from uh thinking something will be a certain way in being able to derivate from that and do something very uh original so the question was and we dealt with this with Nemo too how do you have if there is an established version of a public domain how do you convince players to get away from that you really have to clearly communicate and set expectations for your version of it again no we don't have animal suits um but here's what our game does have and as long as you can communicate that in your marketing materials and tutorials Etc you kind of are setting the same rules for your thing and we've found that audience is actually appreciate that um you know we've had audience members

specifically say hey we like that you're not doing the same Nemo game okay um I am being told that we are at time I do see that there are other questions but I can meet you outside to answer the questions thank you [Applause] [Music] thank you