Are you a talented artist or musician? Would you like to submit concept art or music for use in Fate of Io? Great! But there are several things you should know before you do this.

First and foremost, you must understand that your submissions -- just like your posts and anything else you do on this site -- are subject to our Terms of Service. This basically says that once you contribute to Fate of Io, you are not allowed to "take back" your contribution. Otherwise, certain unscrupulous individuals might try to make a contribution, then later on, once we have spent a considerable amount of time and effort building on this contribution, attempt to hold their original idea for ransom, forcing us to submit to their demands or give up on all that work we had done. We are not being paranoid; things like this have happened to us in the past.

Note that no one here will ever attempt to profit off of your work. The Terms of Service do not ask for permission to sell your work, nor do we expect you to grant us such permission. There is simply no feasible way that we could ever sell Fate of Io for profit, given the number of sources that have influenced it. We are only asking permission to redistribute your work in the form of free downloads.

Art and music submissions can be uploaded to the Media section. Uploading files is a fairly straightforward process; just fill out the forms.

You must upload an editable version of your work. For example, if you create a piece of music as a MIDI and then convert it to an MP3 for upload, you must upload both the MIDI and MP3 versions of the piece. If you do not provide an editable version, we will have no way to build off of your submission, nor even any way to use your submission in the game. We will not be able to use MP3 files directly in the game.

It's OK if you created your work using a proprietary piece of software like Photoshop or Fruity Loops. Upload the project files anyway.

In some cases, the version of your work that you'd upload for display also serves as the "editable" version. For example, if you drew some art on paper and scanned it in, then you might as well submit the picture as a single JPEG file. There is no need to provide a separate "editable" form in this case, as the JPEG is the only form you have.

When uploading files, you are asked to give a name to each file. For these names, simply use the file's type. For example, if you upload an MP3 and a MIDI of your work, title one "mp3" and the other "midi". Don't give files names that match the submission title; this is redundant.

Once you submit your work, you and others who view it will be able to give it a rating between 0 and 100. These ratings are used to rank all the submissions on the site such that the best submissions appear first on the list.

You might wonder if you could abuse the rating system by rating your own work 100/100 and everyone else 0/100. This won't really work. The results would be the same as if you had rated your own work 50/100 and everyone else 49/100. The rating system only takes into account which submissions you think are better than which others. It does not care about the actual numbers you assign. In particular, at no point is any sort of "average" rating computed for any submission, because this average could easily be abused.

If you want to rate your own work above everyone else's, that's up to you. Just like presidential candidates get to vote for themselves, you are free to vote for your own work. However, you are just one person, and others on the site are likely to overrule your ratings if they are inappropriate.

Note that you can, in fact, assign ratings above 100 or below zero. The 100-point scale is just a guideline.

For those interested, the rating system uses an algorithm based on Condorcet's method to produce the final ranks.