We would like to address a mistake on our part.

As can be read on the comments section on our two previous posts (Main Character Sprites and Post Mortem), our main character's sprite shows an uncanny resemblance to the design of the main character of Nykra. While it is not "ripped" in a technical sense from the game/website, all visual characteristics are the same.

It turns out that our artist indeed used Nykra's design as a sort of reference, with the goal of making further changes from there. He didn't get to it, though, and the rest of the team was oblivious to him basing his designs on Nykra, so we uploaded some of the art assets on our blog. If not for the comments under our blog, we would still be unaware of it, and would like to thank everyone who contacted both us and Nykra's creator.

* We would like to publicly apologize for this situation, both to endesga, Nykra's creator, and to all other LD participants. Stealing art is wrong, regardless if it's done on purpose or "by accident". * Stealing from a small, indie developer, feels even more shameful for us.

The responsibility lies with the whole team: Obviously our artist is at fault for copying other people's designs, without any mention to the original creator or the team. But the rest of the team should've also acted more vigilant, and check with the artist whether the designs were original. It's easy to not spend much thought on these things during the rapid prototyping/development in a 72-hour game jam. However, these jams aren't just a competition, but for many of us also a first taste of game developing. Respecting developers' creations is equally important to the technical parts, and is better learned right from the start. We're all, professional devs, amateur devs and gamers, part of this environment, and its culture is in our hand.

We have taken the following measures: - We've talked internally with our artist. It was his first game jam experience (and also his first attempt at pixel art, which is why he looked for examples in the first place), and while that obviously doesn't excuse stealing others' designs, we think it's safe to say that he (but also the whole team) learned this lesson. - Our game wasn't published, and we won't continue working on it before we have created new, original assets. - We have closed the repo we used internally to create the game. - We have also removed any media containing our main character from the Ludum Dare blog.

Again, a huge apology from the whole team. We wish endesga all the best with Nykra (check it out if you haven't, it looks lovely), and hope that this post might be read by other people in a similar situation and keep them from making the same mistakes that we did.