But the fact that a ship in the full version is a direct unattributed sprite-rip from the first boss of Tyrian, loses *ALL* its coolness points in my book. Where else did it steal graphics from? What else did it appropriate? Its music is awesome--but now I have to wonder if it was taken without permission. Like Evony, copyright-violation games aren't good to play.
I hope you're joking with that -- I'm not sure. Not only do we attribute Daniel Cook, we do so in exactly the manner he requests. Almost all of the ships in the game are based on his work from Tyrian or a few other (unreleased) games he was working on in the 90's, heavily edited. Daniel Cook has a cool
blog at which he very graciously supports indie developers by giving away his old pixelart for free, with the only request being a certain form of attribution (that we follow to the letter).
It's fair to say that AI War wouldn't exist, or exist in any sort of form like it currently does, without Daniel Cook having done that. Now that AI War is getting popular enough to bring in enough money to hire an artist, we have done so and are busily sprucing up all of the graphics in general. The new original works by Phil, our new artist, are also something that we are going to give away for free use to other indie developers (once we hit version 2.0 and have a big chunk of them done). The thinking being that we'd like to give back to others in the same way that Daniel Cook helped us get off the ground.
And yes, all of the music is entirely original, by our composer Pablo Vega. When people notice the Tyrian graphics that are recognizable, all they have to do is a google search to see that those are freely available. Not too many just assume I'm a thief, but it's always kind of insulting when that happens.