‘Guys’? Who… me and reidrac? Not sure why you’re including me in that, I only brought it to his attention, and hope they can resolve it between them.
reidrac made it very clear in the open source licence. They even had prior conversations about it.
I’m not sure what this has to do with discouraging people making games in whatever forms.
I’m being sarcastic. 
Ah I see, all good! The emoji at the end I thought indicated otherwise. No worries, everyone carry on as normal! 
Where? I could not see any mention of AI on Flicky by asic28 or Gold Mine Run! by asic28 nor inside the downloaded ZIPs.
Did he change those pages?
So he admits AI usage, then?
Looks like source code is on https://git.usebox.net/gold-mine-run .
The code is licensed MIT, see LICENSE file.
The assets are licensed CC-BY-NC-SA.
Which part is non-complying?
MIT license is permissive, including creating closed-source derivative. If you do not want that, use e.g. GPL.
CC-BY-NC-SA for assets requires that derived assets are shared with as much transparency, which I do not see here.
Well, Flicky by asic28 and both Gold Mine Run! by asic28 say “Name your own price” and suggests 2€ (with an option to just download).
Again, where?
He has updated the page and the game after talking to me.
You are late, so that’s why you may be confused.
In itch still says no AI was used:
But that’s none of my business.
He is following the licence now and I don’t have any complaints. He even apologised to me, which wasn’t necessary.
Thanks for showing me. Indeed it still says “no AI”.
IMHO the presentation image for “Gold Mine Run!” smells AI so much!
Okay, let’s move on.
I said GPL requires that someone who makes a derived product using your source code must also share their source code. Tradition also says a clean room reimplementation without having a look at existing the source code (verifiable by comparing source codes) was legitimate, irrespective of the license of the original product. In this new era of re-implementing things from binary executable data, those things might change?
(Also I’m not a lawyer.)
Exactly.
When it comes to AI involvement, we often overlook the graphics. In some recent games, the sprites (or sometimes just the loading screens) don’t look like they’ve been pixel crafted by hand.
The trouble is it might have been hand drawn in Photoshop, then auto-converted down to platform limitations. Especially if someone is planning releases on multiple formats. You just can’t really say because whilst photo-realistic AI images are usually easy to spot (though getting harder), pixelated, low-colour, low-res ones are more difficult to distinguish from generic image conversions.
This is not to say generic image conversions with no manual cleanup aren’t lazy (We’ve all played the “good” version of Double Dragon) - I’m not trying to make a quality judgement (although in this case I think it looks ok to my heathen eyes)
This loading screen looks absolutely gorgeous to my eyes. The snake seems to pop out of the screen. The stack of gold coins and jewels has some subtle gradients. A few touches of dithering on the stalagtites and rocks (and no dithering everywhere with a checkerboard effect like I see so often). The ray of light from the helmet looks awkward though, as we should not be seeing it.
I’d be impressed if it was created by a machine 
The loading screen does look quite nice. It also does look very much like AI style to me.
Is that even a ‘loading screen’? This appears to be in mode 1, while holding 16 (or even more?) colours. Also, the AI/convert vibes are strong with this one.
As far as I know, the Gold Mine Run port was made with Claude Code. Including graphics and loading screen.
I just played CPC Flicky. I think it’s obviously made by AI and it’s half impressive and half disappointing. Its attention to detail is impressive in places, and yet the lack of attention to detail is a dead giveaway. Like, it has a great title screen and attract mode, but the actual gameplay is buggy. Music plays in the attract mode but there was no sound in game at all. Up, and fire 1, and fire 2, all make you jump AND fire your weapon, that’s not right is it? I think I had -1 lives before the game abruptly ended.
All the graphics need cleaning up so I guess if you were to do this properly you’d say to the AI, give me all the sprite sheets and I’ll redraw them. The title screen needs cleaning up too. And the bugs need to be dealt with.
If those things were fixed it wouldn’t be half bad. But if you don’t care enough to fix them that’s when you get AI slop.
Good points there. The dev did fix the bug where you could still move after losing your last life, but I think you’re right about the jump and fire issue.
Fair points about Flicky, not long played it - the jump+fire simultaneously kinda spoils it, and the sprites are messy. Reminds me of Amstrad port of New Zealand Story, but worse.
I notice the itch page of Gold Mine Run has disappeared too.
It’s back again!
Yep. Because he’s still using assets that are licenced CC NC (no commercial), he can’t charge money for the game. Apparently he didn’t like it.
He ended sending me emails with insults and threats, and removed the game. But now he put it back. I’m sick of this and I asked him to not contact me ever again.
I think I made a mistake engaging with this person. Live and learn I guess.
I still believe in open source and the good it can make. But if someone is not complying with the licence, I’ll enforce my rights if I feel like it. And move on.
