Occasionally I get offers from people who want to give me assets for my game for free, simply because they want to be involved in my project.

On my current project someone has offered to provide me with some music for free, just because he likes the idea and wants to be involved.

What I'm wondering is: should I have him sign a contract saying that he's giving it to me royalty free. I mean am I safe with just having a verbal agreement? Am I being paranoid?

Also, I think it would be very akward asking him to sign a contract(implying distrust) when he's doing me such a big favor.

Just wondering what people's thoughts are on this..

Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

I don't see any reason why he would feel insulted. Musicians in particular tend to be quite paranoid about legalities themselves, often to the point that they don't understand them. At any rate, if you present him with something to sign, just tell him it's a standard practice.

I've yet to be involved in a verbal agreement that went awry, however. You might be a little paranoid, but I'm sure it's a healthy form of it :)

Ask the creator to sign a document giving you a license to use the creative work, but that protects the copyright for themselves.

Then it is not so much "I don't trust you" but "Let's do this right, and protect your valuable creation."

Originally posted by milieu
Ask the creator to sign a document giving you a license to use the creative work, but that protects the copyright for themselves.

Then it is not so much "I don't trust you" but "Let's do this right, and protect your valuable creation."

Hmm... right. Something that says that it's a limited licence and I'll only use it for this project and nothing else, so he feels like it's protecting him too.


Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

Damon-

Hey, I know this is off topic, but I went to your website because I just had to know what a Wizard Slab was. But there's no mention of a slab on your website!

I used to work for a company that owned RightsExchange.com. It was a DRM(Digital Rights Management) company. But it got on all the wrong lists because people thought it was RightSexChange.com. They changed their name.


Anyway, I tried your game, Net Wars. The sound and menus work fine, but when I start a new game, it slows down to a crawl. The level 1 dialog in the middle of the screen never goes away and the scrolling columns of numbers barely move. And the mouse is really slow and unresponsive.

Originally posted by mg_mchenry
Damon-

Hey, I know this is off topic, but I went to your website because I just had to know what a Wizard Slab was. But there's no mention of a slab on your website!

I used to work for a company that owned RightsExchange.com. It was a DRM(Digital Rights Management) company. But it got on all the wrong lists because people thought it was RightSexChange.com. They changed their name.


Anyway, I tried your game, Net Wars. The sound and menus work fine, but when I start a new game, it slows down to a crawl. The level 1 dialog in the middle of the screen never goes away and the scrolling columns of numbers barely move. And the mouse is really slow and unresponsive.


LOL! Someone reading it as Wizard Slab hadn't ever occurred to me. I don't think there's any risk of ending up on any bad lists though since a wizard slab really isn't anything.

As for the game slowing down: you're actually the third person to report this. It seems to happen on certain GeForce cards. Only a couple so far as I know. I haven't seen the slow down problem on any test machine that I have access too. Also none of my testers have had this problem. So far I know of two cards that this happens on: the PNY GeForce4, and the GeForce2Go(don't know what brand). Not all GeForce4 cards have this problem either, just the PNY GeForce4. And the guy that had the GeForce4 said when he turned off hardware exceleration it ran fine. Which is what makes me think it must be the card. My game just doesn't seem to like the 2D exceleration on these cards. I think I may have to just buy one of these cards so I can fix the bug.

So anyway, what kind of video card do you have? And thanks for telling me about the problem.


Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

>My game just doesn't seem to like the 2D exceleration on these cards.

DDraw was broken for awhile (1 or 2 months ago). Getting the latest driver should fix that issue.

Maybe it´s a good idea to write a clause about that you don´t have to use it if you don´t like it. It´s always good to be clear about anything.

Don´t forget to discuss which format you want the music in, if you make small downloadable games you probably not want a 5 mb ogg file or something similar.

...and make sure you use the phrase "non-exclusive rights" - musicians like that just as much as shareware developers. :-)

Originally posted by oNyx
>My game just doesn't seem to like the 2D exceleration on these cards.

DDraw was broken for awhile (1 or 2 months ago). Getting the latest driver should fix that issue.


So maybe it's not my code... I think I should still buy one of the cards in question and test it, just to be safe. It did seem really strange to me though, that my game would run slow on just a few machines--really fast ones too--and run fine on NEARLY EVERYTHING else. A simple DDraw game should not really behave that differently on different cards. It's not like it's a 3D game where you'd expect that.

And now getting back to the topic of the thread: Thanks everyone for all the contract writing tips!

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Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

Mine's an Abit Silero GF4 4200.

I use nVidia's drivers. I'm on v43.45.

I'm downloading 44.03 right now. I'll let you know if there is any improvement.


Regarding donations -
Unless there is a very clear mutually beneficial situation, I'm turning down donations. I don't have much of a budget, but I have commited to paying at least a token(like $50) for any assets from people willing to contribute them, and give a peice of the profits for any significant contributions.

Yes, NVidia 43.45 is the known broken version. 44.03 should fix it.

Thanks for checking on the driver issue for me mg_mchenry. If that's the problem that would be awesome. Then all I'd have to do is email those people that had the problem and tell them to get the latest drivers :D

>>Regarding donations -

I actually did offer him a small royalty but he refused it. I think I'll insist.


Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

For future reference there is no such thing as a verbal agreement in regard to the transfer of IP rights. All other agreements and contracts are binding even if they are only verbal (such as agreeing to sell a car or a company). The same does not apply with IP rights. These can ONLY be transfered via a written agreement.

>>For future reference there is no such thing as a verbal agreement in regard to the transfer of IP rights. These can ONLY be transfered via a written agreement.

So what you're saying is: if I use his music with only a verbal agreement, then technically from a purely legal standpoint I really have no agreement at all and he could later on sue me?

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Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

Yes that is exactly what I am saying.

>>Yes that is exactly what I am saying.


Oh! Thanks for the heads up.

Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

Originally posted by damon
Thanks for checking on the driver issue for me mg_mchenry. If that's the problem that would be awesome. Then all I'd have to do is email those people that had the problem and tell them to get the latest drivers :D

The drivers did the job. Oddly, I've been running that version for months without trouble in any other games, though. But I probably spent most of that time playing BF1942.

Unfortunately, after I finished the demo, the game appeared to freeze up. The screen stopped updating, but a few of the keys I pressed made some sort of sound like I was at a menu screen. I was unable to quit without killing the task.


I think you've got a winner here, though. It's a great twist on missile command. If you take some on some of the ideas mentioned above, you're going to have a great game on your hands. You just need to polish off some of the bugs before a user like me would buy it.


Would you mind saying what language/API you used to build it? I gave up on the idea of doing DD/D3D or GL for my first game because I'm afraid of running into issues just like the one you have now. I'm sticking with the decision, but I'm not convinced that I couldn't have easily gone the other way.

I chose Director and have run into a few problems that are simply out of my control that I could have easily fixed in C++. But, I'm not worried about driver issues...

>>The drivers did the job. Oddly, I've been running that version for months without trouble in any other games, though. But I probably spent most of that time playing BF1942.

Cool! I actually downloaded the driver version you had onto a test machine with a geforce4 card in it and sure enough it slowed way down. I then updated the drivers and it went back to running normally, so that definitely was the problem.

>>Unfortunately, after I finished the demo, the game appeared to freeze up. The screen stopped updating, but a few of the keys I pressed made some sort of sound like I was at a menu screen. I was unable to quit without killing the task.

This is very strange. I've never seen or heard of that happenning. Hmm... I think I need more test machines... and more testers.


>>I think you've got a winner here, though. It's a great twist on missile command. If you take on some of the ideas mentioned above, you're going to have a great game on your hands. You just need to polish off some of the bugs before a user like me would buy it.

Thanks! That's very encouraging to hear. And I do intend incorperate alot of those suggestions in my next version.


>>Would you mind saying what language/API you used to build it? I gave up on the idea of doing DD/D3D or GL for my first game because I'm afraid of running into issues just like the one you have now. I'm sticking with the decision, but I'm not convinced that I couldn't have easily gone the other way.

C++ and DirectDraw. Though in retrospect I kinda wish I'd known about Blitz back then. If think if I'd done it in BlitzPlus (the 2D version) I'd have been done sooner, and it would have looked better. I've only recently started using BlitzPlus and Blitz3D, but I think I may be doing all my future games using these APIs. They solve so many technical problems and I think they'll speed up development ALOT.

This driver problem would have still happened with Blitz though, since it runs on DirectX. Driver problems like this don't concern me too much though, because I know someone else will fix them.


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Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com