Like the title says, you should make a quick Google Doc and write some credits for later. As there’s a lot of people and things that provide help along your journey, but that you’ll forget about/gloss over with time.
You should note:
The company(ies) that worked on your game (including yours if applicable).
The people who worked on it directly.
What software/plugin/addons you used for your game.
And, the most fun, a special thanks where you can put anyone/thing you want.
Here’s mine so far:
Companies:
Wackshop Games
Software & Plugins:
The Godot Engine
Kenny Prototype Textures
Script-IDE Plugin
Staff:
Demetrius Dixon (Creator, Project Lead, Me)
Special Thanks:
The player (For playing)
My parents, who tolerated my BS for 21+ long years.
The entire Godot community
The entire Godot forum
The Monkanics Discord community.
@pennyloafers for invaluable netcode learning and development help.
Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville for kickstarting my long-term game design interests
The PvZ community for giving me some good times and helping me build my game development skills.
YouTube as a whole for providing years of entertainment and my first look into my career path.
GD-Sync devs for helping me reverse engineer Monkanics’ relay server via their Github repo.
@ezcha for helping me figure out the correct Bash commands for the relay server.
@MDDigital, the creator of the Letato (Lemon + Potato) and the first piece of Monkanics concept art that was born on a whim in the Monkanics Discord.
And this list will be continued as Monkanics develops. See how fun this is.
What’s your credits going to look like? And what else should you add?
I find it awesome that the Letato, something I created as the purest of jokes during a chat about how we thought Monkanics’ servers would run, has reached such a level that it’s now official Monkanics media. Not only that, I get my own place in the credits for it. Wicked!
I’ve been working on a credits plugin to make it easy to do credits. It’s coming along quite well. I just used it in a game jam for the first time. I added it to the game Rick O’Shea, and I think they’re really awesome. I learned some things.
Basically, you just feed it scenes in an Array, and it plays them all for you. You can even add shaders, like I did with this Godot logo, so it gets hit with shine as it scrolls up.
I then also added a special music node. You give it a directory, and it scans all the songs in there. And it pulls out tags attached to Ogg Vorbis and Wav files and turns them into movie-style music credits. So I just make sure the tags are updated when I add a sound file to my game, and there’s no more work to do.
Then, during the jam, I realized I could use the music plugin to scan the sound effects folder (it scans all subfolders too) and list every resource in the game. (I just did this to pad out the running time of the credits to match the song.)
With my first game I totally forgot about this and it became a nightmare trying to re-find all the stuff I had used, mostly sound effects from https://freesound.org/ and even if credit is not required I give it anyway.
I now keep a script on every project where I note in comments all the credits.
Oh I got excited when I read that! However I think an addon that is much more simple, perhaps something just in the editor that lets you record credit info instead of my more brute force additional script would be very handy. Perhaps just category (music, graphics, code, contributor etc) with some handy input boxes for URL, name, resource etc. Then an export button to convert it all to a dictionary perhaps when you need to use it in code.
My credit list often ends up huge! I mean, even in just a scroll list it is screens and screens of scrolling!
So my solution would be to create another type of section with more details. Perhaps an Array of Resource objects named Credit that store URL, name, resource name, and the category they belong to.
Like you, I store them all in a text file for tracking. I use README.md because I’m used to formatting markdown files. Ultimately, it might make sense to have a spreadsheet and convert it to .csv and read that in to generate credits.
For now, I decided to not hyperlink everything and let people google things if needed, because I don’t think people even watch my credits.
Not one time “Licenses” in this thread? As important as the author is the license for every single 3rd party asset. That’s an important part of credits. (When licenses like CC are attached to the asset).
I don’t think licenses are important in credits. I think it’s important for you to know. I keep them in my README.md. But in credits you are not required to list license types. a CC Attribution license for example, is satisfied by the creator being mentioned in the comments. An MIT license only needs to be distributed with the thing you’re using - it doesn’t need to be visible in the Credits. Public Domain and CC0 don’t need to be acknowledged anywhere.
I know that it’s not needed for PD and CC0, but if I have the Name, I’ll add them, too.
It’s the minimum you have to do, but you are free to add that info.
Technically it is correct, that the license has only be available in the source, where the assets are available, but I prefer them in the credits too. Just for transparency.
But it’s important to document them somehow, I use one document for that as basis for the credits.
In that case, if I were going to include them, I would create an Enum to track them so I could just select the license from a dropdown and then let my code output that info.
