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i'm a ''''game developer'''' (i made one game that got streamed by a kind of shitty but very popular guy 10 years ago) and i've been trying to make a new game but the first game i made was extremely full of copyrighted material because i just built it out of whatever i wanted, whatever came to mind, including mp3s on my desktop and things i just googled and added without a second thought.
now, broke and desperate, i have been forced by the Machine that zaps me whenever i can't pay it money to create something Monetizable™. i am trying to build the game but i am stricken with David Lynch's Thought Poison™ ("I didn't really feel like I had permission to make it my own. (...) little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises-- knowing I couldn't go here and not wanting to go there. I just fell, you know, into this middle world. It was a sad place to be.") because the part of me that just wants to put whatever the fuck I want into the game is fighting against the anxiety of knowing if I use AI textures or ogg files of 12 second loops from songs I like or pictures of public figures or art from random sources or fonts that I got from questionably legal websites that even if I make a really good game that I'm proud of, I won't be able to sell it to help myself pay the Eternal Zapping Machine. how do I navigate this moral and existential crisis?
you could use creative commons or pre-copyright material. there are so many obscure old archives waiting to be collaged. you can also take pictures/record foley in the world. and a lot of material from any source becomes unrecognizable with enough distortion. music is the most litigious media to watch out for. but it wouldn't be an issue either way unless it was a very lucrative game, which is pretty rare. good luck!
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