Update: More Emotions
March 16, 2019
The past few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind.
First of all, preparations for my GDC talk are complete. I'm actually giving the talk just two days from now. You can read the full description at the link below, but keep the intended audience in mind: "Anyone who isn't ready to roll over and die just yet." Hopefully, that describes you.
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/2014-vs-2018-the-shape-of-financial-success-before-and-after-the-indiepocalypse/864486
Also in the past few weeks: a huge, confusing debate about the boundaries of the public domain and authorship, as it concerns One Hour One Life and the unofficial mobile adaptation. There are very few precedents here, and lots of different opinions. You can get a taste of this here, in what became one of the longest and most viewed threads in OHOL forum history:
http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5479
You can also read the opposing point of view, in which I almost became a Sith Lord:
http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5534
There are two upshots of this discussion. First, the mobile developers have decided to eliminate this confusion in the future by hard-forking the game. They will be eventually operating under their own unique title, and they've already started the process of designing their own mascot character, and some of their own background textures, which you can see as sample of here:
I recently realized that the "mascot" they had been using in their mobile icon---my Original Eve character---happens to be my cartoon rendition of my own mother:
The hard fork will also involve a content fork from here on out, so my weekly updates will no longer be rolled directly into their game.
The second upshot is that I've clarified my stance on copyright, moral rights, personal rights, and trademark. In the past, I had only thought about copyright, and decided specifically that I did not want to wield it. Over the past fifteen years, I've never faced the situation of a direct competitor using my work to make a almost-identical service that would be confusing to end users. When I placed my work in the public domain, I never thought, "Hey, that means that someday, people may widely believe that someone else is the original author of my work." Furthermore, I realized that competitors have a huge unfair advantage against me, as I toil away on weekly content updates that they can roll into their product with almost no work at all. Finally, I realized that the ultimate financial nightmare---a completely free but identical OHOL PC service, maybe even operating on Steam---was a possibility, unless I clarified things. Yes, I was hoping Steam wouldn't allow such a thing, but if I'm serious about retaining no rights, that's an intellectually dishonest thing to be hoping. I've decided that trademark is the best tool to use to deal with such issues. My clarified "no_copyright" file can be seen here:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyright.txt
To summarize: you can do whatever you want with my work, with no restrictions and no permission necessary, but don't mislead people, and don't use my non-code work to directly compete against the service that I'm operating.
Despite all of that, here I am, on the eve of GDC, with a small but amusing content update for you.
More emotions. Lots of little bug fixes. Enjoy!
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