Kia ora Davidpgil, first, congrats on your decision to get into libre game
development! Always good to see more people get involved. As a gamer, a
writer, and a person who dreams up lots of experimental projects and
occasionally gets something to happen, it's an area I am getting quite
interested:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/libre-game-development
For funding, I know even less than Onpon, but I recommend at least having a
look at Goteo.org, a platform that specializes in crowdfunding libre licensed
projects, and Gratipay.com, a more libre-friendly version of Patreon, the
entire source to their site is on GITHub under a public domain dedication!:
https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com
I agree with Magic Banana in principle on the NC and ND clauses (although I
think it's unnecessarily stingy when people use both as in CC-NC-ND). But if
you choose to use copyright restrictively, you need to think about how you
are going to ensure compliance. Do you really want to go down the road of
lawyering up in the unlikely event that a marketing giant decides to sell
your stuff without sharing the revenue? It might be that as with GPL
enforcement, using the Creator-Endorsed Mark and social pressure is more
effective in making sure you get a fair share of any money made out of your
creation. Obscurity is a bigger threat to your efforts on the internet than
piracy, as O'Reilly quipped.
One thing to try is something that apparently worked for the developer of a
desktop app called the Illumination Software Creator (can't find the blog
post right now). The ILC dev put the code under GPL, but didn't distribute
gratis binaries themselves. If people really wanted a free copy, they could
compile it from source, and people could give copies of the binaries to each
other legally. But apparently lots of people were willing to make a small
one-off payment to download each new milestone version as it came out,
because they wanted to support the developer and keep new versions coming,
and respected their choice to use GPL (or didn't know or care).
This would be one advantage of choosing a cross-platform libre game engine
that can allow you to sell binaries to Windows and Mac users, and maybe even
mobile OS users, through traditional game and app stores. I don't think
putting libre games in Steam is a "ruinous compromise" (as Stallman put it),
especially if you're really pushing the envelop by putting all the game
artwork under a free culture license (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or CC0).
