I am finishing what I call stage one of a project I have been working on for a long time. Stage one is an open world landscape built with Unity. I’ve been working on it for two years or so and the terrain – river, lake, roads, paths, fields, meadows, grass, flowers, trees, buildings, sounds of wind, crickets, water, etc are all in place (or almost in place). I did all of the design work – sculpted the terrain (using Unity and GeoControl), made the trees in Tree Creator, designed the leaf and bark and grass and flower textures using stock art from CG Textures, made one of the models, imported the rest from Turbosquid. I mixed the nature sounds from downloaded clips from Freesound.org. And I wrote what simple code the world needs.
My question is how to put together the credits. What should I call myself? Artist? Designer? How do I credit and thank the sources of textures, sounds and models I have used? Just not sure what words to use. Any help will be appreciated.
To avoid sounding like an ego-maniac, one thing I’ve done is, rather than list your own name a hundred times, have the names be the heading, then list what they did beneath it. For instance:
Just an idea.
There actually are some set rules as to who and how you credit people and organizations. I don’t have a link handy, but if you head over to IGDA, you should be able to find it.
Looks beautiful! And my advice - keep it simple. Words like “Developer” or ‘Developed by’ can mean lots of things. “Resources” and “Contributions” are also generic. See my sig for examples of apps with credits. In ‘Great Marriage’, I credit external musicians as well.
NOTE - Glad to see you are looking to give external credit for stuff you didn’t purchase/acquire rights to. It’s the right call.
Thanks for the compliment. Yes, I want to give credit, included purchased assets in my credits too. The sounds I used aren’t “music” as such. They are nature sounds like wind, crickets, babbling river, but I am crediting the names of those who made the recordings.
Each of the audio files on Freesound.org is licensed according to the author’s choice and the licensing tells how to credit,
such as the Attribution License which reads in part:
“Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor
(but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).”
So, if the file used this particular license you’d have to check out the author’s (contributor’s) Freesound page to see how they’d like to be credited.
Often, sites that have ‘attribution’ or ‘creative commons’ licenses have separate licenses that drop the ‘credit’ requirement once you purchase. It’s kind of like with Unity, if you purchase Unity Pro, they remove the ‘credit’ splash screen.
I chose all sound that were Creative Commons either attribution or zero license and I am listing them like this:
Stock Sounds from Freesound.org
Wind recorded by Akacie
Crickets recorded by Reinsamba
Yeah, as long as the contributor has no special request, I’d say however you provide a genuine credit should be fine,
many of them just want Freesound.org mentioned.
I’ve paid a couple of contributors for use of their audio files in my game, that were licensed as non-commercial.
One I just needed to contact to satisfy his requirement for commercial use,
the rest I am using the download record they have on the server for each user for a much more extensive listing.
Just want to let everybody know I finished my project and used your advice for the credits. If you want to see it, go to http://bitsong.com/Unity3D/SummersDay/SummersDay.html. To see the credits, after Summer’s Day loads, press the shift key and click on the last icon on the right. Thanks again!
