I have an arcade style game idea, but although I'm an OK with photoshop, I kinda suck at making illustrations of characters and avatars. I have a Clip Art collection that has a set of about 20 silly alien characters in bitmap images that I like a lot. They would work perfect for this game.

Question: the Clip Art CDs, "Click Art" brand, don't say anything about copyright or limits of usage in electronic form. Safe to assume it's royalty free?

Question: Is this considered cheesy not to make your own artwork from scratch?

You need to read the license agreement that came with your clip art very carefully. The agreement may prohibit using the clip art in commercial products or just in a trademark (your logo, etc). It may also have a list of uses that require you to contact the company for a separate license. If the product doesn't come with a printed agreement, check on the CD. It's not really safe to assume anything. Also check their company website. And if still in doubt, a letter to the company will probably net an answer. The agreement may require you to augment your game's copyright statement to include them somehow. I used Hemera's Big Box of Art and the agreement pretty clearly spelled out their rules.

Clip art is a little cheesy, but who cares. It can make a great placeholder until you can afford an artist. And many players will never even know you've used stock images. Aside from legal issues, there's also the chance that someone else will use the same graphics in their own game, reducing your game's distinctiveness. As an alternate to clip art you might try 3D modeling your game objects and rendering them in 2D. I find character modelling a little easier than drawing.

elund- I went back and looked at "Click Art" again and sure enough there is a License Agreement about the rules including embedding the images in software or downloadables (not allowed). I think I'll try to get written permission- because I sure like these characters.

Thanks for the tips.

Microsoft has similar protection on their clip art with Office. I remember hearing of a local car dealership that used Office clipart in their advertisements, and got in trouble with MS. It's fine for personal use, but business use of the cliparts was forbidden.

Most people don't think about it, because they paid for the product, they assume it's theirs. Just be careful when using clip art to always check the License.

Pretty lame of MS! After all it is called MS *OFFICE* :cool:

Perhaps they should call it SimOffice.

On a similar subject, I wanted to use photos from the "Print Artist" collection of Sierra in my game, and couldn't find anything about commercial use on the CDs or manual... After browsing the web, I found in some forum/FAQ that it was only for personnal use... That's pretty lame IMO ;-)

Anyway now I'm using my own photos as backgrounds and they look better, nah ;-)

Anyone know of good public-domain photos of planets, stars, galaxies, etc?

NASA (http://www.nasa.gov) may have some images you can use. Their policy (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html) seems to be pretty open.

Thanks- it appears that *some* Hubble space telescope pix are public domain too

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/