Ah, thank you for taking the time to respond to me. The situation has become clearer now.
Unfortunately, Wecoc is lying, and the game is accidentally using stolen sprites.
The contest was announced on October 25th, 2012, and the winners submitted their sprites via private messaging November 3rd. It’s strange that Hideon would post his trees on September 22nd, 2012, before they would be posted in time for the contest.
That’s not all though: Hideon posted this sprite of a demon he made on March 21st, 2012 along with a nice little reference picture. He kept updating the thread with more screenshots of his work in progress until he posted his last update on May 4th, 2012.
Wecoc also posted the exact same demon sprite on April 5th, 2012, a month after Hideon originally posted it. He then updated it with the last picture to be posted in Hideon’s thread, the complete piece, on the exact same day Hideon did on May 4th. The other sprites in the thread seem to be his original work.
Wecoc has put out several other tilesets, and none of the other tilesets they posted contain those trees. This one in 2014 edits XP trees instead of uses those nice trees Wecoc claimed to have made, which is strange because if I made a damn good looking tree like that, I’d recolor it and put it in my sprite packs as well. But he didn’t.
I’m sorry, but Wecoc lied to you. I’m also sorry to say this since I was hoping it was a mistake, but according to an anonymous sender, you might be lying too.
hi i saw your post and remebered that the pm team did a livestream of the map making of fletas area
http://livestre.am/51FzB
at around 9:30 min you can see them opening the file, and the name is “tileset_forest.png” which is the same name you would get by directly downlaoding the image on the forum post you linked to. you can also see that the tree wasnt the only resource used since they use the grass pixels too, to cover the whole map.
actual trees being used: http://livestre.am/51FBm at 10:50 min
The gif is archived here in case the video does not work for you. The quality isn’t the best, unfortunately, but you can make it out. If you download Wecoc’s post, it’s called forest_tileset_B (if . I reversed image search the image as well, and it turns out that unless you got these sprites off pinterest, you didn’t find it on a free to use compilation post because there is no free to use complication post. Even if you did, that, erm, pretty much bites.
This is one of the reason why I posted this here on Pinkuboa instead of bringing it straight to you: someone brought evidence forward that contradicts your story that I wouldn’t have found on my own. In fact, I was alerted by someone that the dates on the wecoc & hideon post didn’t add up. If your team happened to be innocent, either nothing would pop up or evidence that you didn’t would of and good news, it would just be me who looked like a fool. That, and if you did take it off a free compilation post, people like @ariastory-project who happen to be using the titlesets for their current game can now take them down now that they know about wecoc’s theft!
The previous case of asset theft the community had to tackle, Lilutale (who is now changing the sprites so please don’t bug her about it), didn’t admit to tracing Miwashiba’s sprites and didn’t answer questions about it when asked. I was afraid you’d do the same.
Finally, I’d like to address a few tweets members of the team posted on to twitter, which I’m not usually active on but still check.
@beboldbebold I’m sorry you guys didn’t notice the contradicting dates on the post. Easy to miss I suppose. Thankfully a few people came up and pointed out the discrepancy to the two, so thank those nice anonymous users for us that lead me and someone else to do more detective work.
I understand not liking to have the burden of proof shifted on to you, but I couldn’t unearth more until your team did.
@kiramekirari I did not insult you a single time in that post, nor did I insult you in the small conversation I had with lazyplague on the blog, and was hoping that I was wrong. Instead, you misinterpret this as me shooting a torpedo at you. Your game has been published on the web for nearly a year now, Pocket Mirror is now a publicly known game. If I was wrong, you had nothing to lose, and I would of conceded like I have before.
Instead of confronting me about this with respect, you decided to go onto another social platform, insult me in public to all of your followers, and then deleted it like the two faced coward you are. Whether or not you stole it (and from the video I’m pretty sure you did), I respected you every step of the way sent you a post, and you don’t even have the guts to respond to me in public.
You’re a two faced weasel who’s lost all my respect, and you’re now making me wonder if you’ve ever emotionally evolved after our first public argument, the one where I apologized and you didn’t despite your arrogant tone. At least I suppose you got smarter since you tried to be sneaky about it. Ish.