What we will never ship: the studio license gate

The studio's asset pipeline -- codename Foundry -- generates meshes, rigs, motion, textures, audio and concept art with a rotating cast of open models. For a commercial studio the real constraint on that pipeline is not VRAM. It is licensing.

The map

Every tool and dataset Foundry touches is filed under one of three tiers, and the file is re-verified against the upstream LICENSE before first shipping use:

• GREEN may write to assets/, which is the only directory a game build can read from.
• AMBER is conditional. A named risk -- typically a permissive code license sitting on top of a non-commercial training corpus -- has to be cleared first. Until then the tool runs in prototyping/ only.
• RED is quarantined. It may never write to assets/. Several well-known 3D and video models are RED because their weights or their training data are non-commercial, regardless of how the code is licensed.

The test is not the code license. It is training-data provenance. A permissively-licensed checkpoint trained on a non-commercial dataset is AMBER at best, and the remedy is usually to retrain on our own renders.

Provenance per asset

Every asset that reaches assets/ carries a record: the tools used, the declared training-data sources, the license, and the human who approved it and when. The record feeds a disclosure generator that writes the platform statements (Steam's pre-generated-content tier, itch.io's category checkboxes) directly from the ledger, so the public disclosure cannot drift from what actually shipped.

What it means for this site

Anything published here as playable or downloadable inherits the gate. That is why the WRECKNET and STARGLIDE pages draw their own key art from a palette instead of showing concept renders: those renders exist, and they are not cleared. When they are, they will appear with their provenance attached.

It also means the disclosure text on each title page is not marketing copy. It is generated from the same ledger the build is gated on.