Let’s say I grab a photograph of scenery from google images, put it in photoshop, slap some filters and crap on it to make it look all artsy and whatever for a 2D game, and then I put other objects on it, like platforms and stuff, for the characters to walk on, and my game is put on the android and other official app stores… Am I good, legally? Or will someone possibly come along and be like “Hey I took a photograph that looks just like that picture, minus all the photoshop filters you put on it to make it look hella different!” ?
If it is recognizeable, you are in trouble(legally). Whether anything comes out of it or not is another story, but “technically” it is a derived work. Maybe, if you are pretty good at using photoshop and filters, you could either use creative commons(or other freely commercially usable) art, or you could learn to create a style all your own. Maybe you could create some filled line art(vector style), and then apply a bunch of filters etc… to that, and get an acceptable result that way. If you do the same thing for all of your scenery, it will likely have a consistent style, which is more important than even having good art. Better is bad but consistent art then good but not consistent art styles.
I see thank you for the input, I guess I’ll totally avoid that for now until I get better at isolating elements of nature scenes and turning them into my own totally altered/filtered 2D assets and such.
Kind of off topic for this thread, but yea while I learn to make my own high quality 2D game art, I’m going to buy some premade ones to speed up the release of our first game. I’m not sure what terms people use to find them, but so far I discovered “tilesets” is a good one. Is that what they’re all called, or are there different keywords to use? So far I’ve picked some cheap packs in Unity that I might buy once I see how it all adds up in my cart…
Do you have any good recommendations besides what I’d find on the front page of the 2D /isometric section? Even if it’s other sites. I’m basically looking for stuff that looks like it wasn’t made for the SNES, so not really pixelated. And the realism has no upper limit. So flat minimally shaded textures to stuff that looks like it was taken from photographs.
So maybe more stuff like that, where I can build my own platforms, but hopefully more variety. So far I’m mostly finding mostly forest packs. I’d like stuff for making more cave scenes, and mines, and sci-fi stuff, cityscapes, etc.
Check www.opengameart.org ,most is open for use, just check the licensing of each as some will want small payment & others just want to be credited.
Not sure about cgtextures.com but read their site if you wanted to use their textures for anything you are doing.
It doesn’t matter what it is or how deep you bury it, you can’t/shouldn’t use other people’s work without permission.
The only exceptions I’m aware of for that are parody, news and education, and there are significant limits for those.
For search terms you might also want to try “sprites” and, more generically, “2D art/assets”.
Unfortunately, getting consistent art often means having in-house talent to work on it to some degree, to either fill gaps (its unlikely you’ll find all of exactly what you want) or to make styles consistent (what you find might be close, but not ideal).