Industry Practice - Week 14:

In this blog I will talk about Design Protection, what it is and what it can protect, our considerations towards this and considerations we need to make about Ren'Py with its file types.

Design Protection:

There are three different ways that designs can legally be protected which is unregistered designs, registered designs and artistic copyright. Unregistered designs and artistic copyright don't need to be applied for as in the uk they are automatically applied however there are limitations to these and it is better to apply to register the designs so the designs are better protected. (Williams, 2025)

There are different types of game design aspects that can be protected such as characters, gameplay mechanics, UI design and other aspects. 

There are a list of requirements for a registration for a design to be accepted:

- Must be a new / original idea
- Must not be commonplace (Blue jumper - something commonly seen)
- Must not be offensive 
- Must not use protected flags or emblems
- Must not be an invention (A patent would be needed for it instead)
(Williams, 2025)

Depending on if the design is registered or not affects the amount of time that the protection is present as for unregistered designs the rights last up to 15 years in the uk however registered designs last up to 25 years that can be renewed every 5 years. Designs need to be registered within 1 year of the creation of the design. (Williams, 2025)

Williams R., 2025. 14_Design Rights_Renpy - IP [online]. NTU Now: Industry Practice. [Accessed 21 February 2025]

Thoughts about our own group designs:

We will need to reference any artwork that we use for inspiration to create our designs so that we can credit the owner of the designs we take inspiration from.

We are planning on using music created by a friend of one of the members in our group and we are thinking about the protection of the music and the rights we have to use it and we realised that we can't protect the music as we aren't the owners however we have the permission to use it. 

With our character designs we could protect our character designs because they are our designs and were created by our group for our game so we are able to register it if we wanted to. However to do this we need to make sure that when we take inspiration from already existing characters that our characters are unique enough from them that they aren't a close copy of them however we can use them to inform the decisions we make about the characters made.

When creating a visual novel game a main factor is the font used so we will either need to create the font ourselves by drawing it out or we can create it using different websites online or if we do use someone else's font then we will need to reference it showing we aren't the original creator of the font. We need to make sure that it is a readable font and we should put some consideration into making sure that people with disabilities can read it so we could make an option in the accessibility tab if we have one that possibly changes a font to an easier to read one such as Open Dyslexia or changes the colours so that the game is playable by more people and so that the game is inclusive to as many people as possible.

Technical considerations:

We need to consider the fact that all of us use different software's and devices to create artwork so we need to consider how we are going to keep all the artwork and creation of the artwork as similar as possible so that the outcome of the art that is seen in game looks the same. 

If everyone creates art we need to makes sure that everyone is using similar brushes, the same canvas size and DPI and the same colours if they are for the same character. With all of these factors to think about we thought that the end results wouldn't be similar enough with us all having different art styles as well, so instead of us all creating artwork and trying to replicate an art style we may not be comfortable with we decided it would be best if one person creates the final pieces. We decided that we would have the less confident people work on the sketches of the characters or environments and then a single person take those and render them so they all end up being in the same style with one specifically working on the characters and the other on the environments. This would ensure that one person isn't doing quite a bit of work on the creation of both the characters and the environments however the art still stays consistent. 

Ren'Py requires character art to be either a PNG or a WEBP file whilst backgrounds are required to be JPG, JPEG, PNG or WEBP files which we need to ensure that we decide a file type and stick to the same one so there is no confusion. We also need to make sure that all our backgrounds use 1280 x 720 for their size.