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[Lofn]

If your project never becomes very big, it is doubtful that it will attract the attention of thieves and if it does it won't impact you financially to any meaningful extent.  If your project does become huge, then as GTM said anyone who lifts your assets will be ridiculed for doing so.  Ultimately it doesn't really matter if someone takes your sprites except on an emotional level and personally I don't think it'd be worth the effort to encrypt/obscure the sprites just to slow down potential thievery.

[Virex]

Here's a simple 3-step encryption plan that will work for the rest of your life:

1) Download zlib: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib or bzip2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2
2) Compress all your files into a gzip (*.tar.gz) or a bzip2 (*.tar.bz2)
3) Rename the extension and don't tell anyone

There you go. You've prevented the vast majority of people from opening your files.

Frankly, if you really feel that your art assets are that important or valuable (protip: they're not), then follow the advice of other people in this thread and license your artwork. If you're willing to put the time into making artwork, you should be willing to put the time into legally protecting your artwork. It'll always ensure that your name is tied to your work.

This method is so simple that it's almost not worth not doing it, even if you're only protecting your sprites for emotional reasons and yet it deters the largest part of would-be copiers...

[Shades]

This method is so simple that it's almost not worth not doing it, even if you're only protecting your sprites for emotional reasons and yet it deters the largest part of would-be copiers...

I don't know, any one who was using it for a website or to upload to something to say they did it probably wouldn't know how to find the files anyway and would use screenshot, which this doesn't stop at all.

[Muz]

Also, anyone know of a way to protect art in indie games?  I dunno how the big guys do it...  I was thinking I might try to come up with a simple encryption algorithm for my images, though that might make loading times a bit longer.

Well, they keep it internally Don't leave them as BMP files outside and you should stop a lot of art theft. You can't stop it completely. After all, there's all those fake Sonic, Mario, M Bison sprites running around and those games aren't even PC

so, do you guys think sprite theft is an issue and if so, do you know of any solutions?

Yes, but only if you're using stolen sprites. Nobody likes stolen sprites, any game's rep significantly drops if they use library graphics, much more for stolen sprites.

IMO, don't worry about it too much. Even if you have the best sprites in the world, no notable games will steal them. If anyone steals the sprites, it won't mix unless they steal the background and other sprites too. Just showing your art style is good enough evidence that it's yours.

So, yeah.. don't worry about it. Sprite theft is the lowest of all the copyright theft, even harder to pull off right than plagiarism or code theft.

When you're starting off, these things may seem like an issue, but think of the big picture. Your main worry is about whether people are enjoying your game. Everything else is under that. If you're making art, you should definitely be worrying more if people are enjoying your art. I'd take it as a compliment if people were stealing my art, not that I'd encourage it.

[qwertyuiopas]

If you want sprites that are nearly impossible to steal, create a custom image format that is not based off of any form of compression of a raster image, have a fancy file format to store them in that is very confusing, _NEVER_ display a sprite without an atmospheric overlay to foil screenshot, find some way to obfuscate the code that loads the image data, pre-apply some of the atmospheric effects at load time so that the raw image data is never in memory, and finally, demand that microsoft puts special security into their next OS that ensures that all of the drivers are unready, the hardware is overpriced and underpowered, there are huge preformance bottlenecks, it  will be vista all over again, but at least nobody can steal your art... (At least for a few weeks longer than otherwise).

Or just do something simple to defeat the laziest 80%, and accept the fact that the other 20% can still steal your art.

(There is, of course, countless different ways to protect your art, but every one of them makes a tradeoff between ease of implementation, speed to read, and security)

[Sean Mirrsen]

It is, in effect, impossible to make your art completely safe. Except by not publishing it. Even if you go to great lengths and include monstrous safety features, a few people hell-bent on overthrowing you will still eventually disassemble your executables and make a quick extractor utility for everything. There's just no point.

Unless, of course, you consider a different scenario. People won't steal your art - even if it's out in the open as BMPs - if it's utter crap. So just make crappy art and save it anywhere - it'll be perfectly safe.

[Soadreqm]

Regarding licensing:

Everything you ever publish in any form, as long as it fills the basic legal requirements for a creative work, and you don't specifically state otherwise, is already copyrighted. There's international treaties about it and everything. The most common reason to use special licenses is that you want to let others use and spread the stuff while still retaining some legal control over it.

Of course, this doesn't even deter most people. You could slap huge copyright warning labels on everything, but they don't have any legal purpose, and the only thing they do is inform people that they are in fact going against your wishes when they recycle all your sprites without asking for permission. Which still doesn't deter anyone.

Yeah, feel free to take any measures you deem worthwhile, but my advice is to stop caring about it and focus on making a good game.

[Googolplexed]

Ultimately, I think the overlap of lazy sprite stealers and decent computer reverse engineers is fairly small
Just encrypt your stuff, and decrypt it into ram at runtime

Sure, they can steal the key
Sure, they can steal it out of ram

But out of the types of people who steal sprites, how many do you think know how to do this ?
For the people who can, it would take quite a while, even with minor encryption.

If people go to massive lengths to decode sprite data, then 90% of the time, its not about stealing it, its about honoring it.
Making avatars out of old games, desktop wall papers.

If your game gets popular enough for people to do this, then I imagine any efforts to decode your sprites will not be malicious
and any attempts to steal them will get ridiculed

[Sergius]

You should build a fence around your sprites, that'll stop people from stealing them. Add a sign that reads "Beware of Dog".

[Virex]

You should build a fence around your sprites, that'll stop people from stealing them. Add a sign that reads "Beware of Dog".

Also make the fence and the sign fugly or they'll just copy that

[Sergius]

You should build a fence around your sprites, that'll stop people from stealing them. Add a sign that reads "Beware of Dog".

Also make the fence and the sign fugly or they'll just copy that

Well, yeah, you have to copyright the sign. Don't forget to add an EULA that whoever copies the sign will get 999 years of forced labor according to law. Everyone knows that whoever writes the EULA gets to decide how the law works.