TERMS OF SERVICE

1Who this agreement is with

petridish.games and its subdomains (together, "the Site") are operated by Max Pliskin, trading as Petri Dish Games ("we", "us", "our"), an individual developer based in Colorado, United States.

By loading, browsing, playing or otherwise using the Site you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree to them, do not use the Site. If you are using the Site on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are allowed to accept these Terms for it.

2What the Site is

The Site currently carries:

• marketing pages for games in development, including Substrate: Emergence;
• games playable in the browser, such as Teztlotzl Arena and Greenout;
• interactive tools and experiments, including the Glia genetic synthesizer and the Rorschach Lab;
• the Concordance, a reference wiki about the worlds in the Petri Dish;
• public readouts of the agent-driven development pipeline that builds all of the above.

Any of these may change, move or disappear. Nothing on the Site is an offer, a promise of a feature, or a commitment to a release date.

3Your licence to use the Site

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the Site for your own non-commercial enjoyment. That licence ends automatically if you breach these Terms.

4What you may not do

You agree not to:

• attack, overload, probe or otherwise interfere with the Site or the servers behind it, including the Rorschach Lab API;
• submit automated, scripted or bulk votes, renders or crossing requests, or otherwise try to distort the evolutionary population;
• scrape the Site at a rate or scale that degrades it for other people;
• copy, rehost, resell or redistribute the games, art, video, audio or written material as your own work;
• remove or obscure any credit, notice or watermark;
• reverse engineer any part of the Site, except where that right cannot lawfully be excluded;
• use the Site to break any law, or to harass anyone.

5Our material, and the open source part

The games, source code, art, video, audio, page copy and the text of the Concordance are owned by us or used with permission, and are protected by copyright. The names Petri Dish Games, Substrate: Emergence, Teztlotzl Arena, Greenout, Glia and Rorschach Lab, and their logos, are ours.

The source of this website is published at github.com/mr-maxo-PDG/petridish.games. Where a file in that repository is covered by its Apache License 2.0, that licence governs your use of that file and nothing in these Terms takes away a right it grants you. Game builds and store assets distributed elsewhere are not covered by it.

6What you contribute

Some pages accept input. In the Rorschach Lab, choosing between two organisms records a vote; crossing a pair asks the lab to breed a child from them. Those actions are the selection pressure that drives the population, and their results are public: a surviving organism can be dealt to anyone else and can appear in the Gallery.

By using those features you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, use, publish and build upon what you submit, for the purpose of running and showing the experiment. You do not acquire ownership of any organism, genome, shader or session produced by the Site, and we claim no ownership of anything you make in a local tool and export to your own machine.

Do not submit anything you do not have the right to submit. We can remove any contribution, at any time, for any reason.

7Other companies' platforms

The Site links out to and embeds services we do not control: Steam, itch.io, Google Play, Discord and YouTube among them. Once you are on one of those, that company's terms and privacy policy apply, not ours.

All purchases happen on those platforms. We never take your payment details, and refunds, entitlements and account problems are handled by the store you bought from, under its own policy.

8Availability, and losing your work

The Site is offered as-is and as-available, with no uptime commitment. Experiments get taken down, rebuilt and broken without notice.

Tools such as Glia autosave into your own browser's local storage. That storage is not a backup: clearing your browser data, switching device or browser, or a change we ship can lose it. Export anything you care about to a file.

9Disclaimer

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Site is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

Photosensitivity note. Several pages render live simulations and shaders with flicker, high contrast and rapidly changing patterns. A very small number of people may experience seizures when exposed to such images. Stop using the Site and consult a doctor if you feel dizziness, altered vision, twitching or disorientation.

The Concordance is fiction about fictional worlds. It is not scientific, medical or biological advice.

10Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, lost saves or lost goodwill, arising out of your use of the Site, even if we were told such damage was possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the Site is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us directly for access to the Site in the twelve months before the claim, and (b) fifty United States dollars (US$50).

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusions above, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

11Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of the Site in breach of these Terms or in breach of the law.

12Age

The Site is for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13. If you are under 13 (or under 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom), do not use the interactive features. See the Privacy Policy for what is and is not collected.

13Changes and termination

We may update these Terms. The current version always lives at this address with its effective date at the top; continuing to use the Site after a change means you accept the new version. We may suspend or withdraw access to the Site, or any part of it, at any time.

14Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Colorado for any dispute arising from them.

If you are a consumer resident somewhere whose law gives you mandatory protections or the right to sue locally, this section does not take those rights away.

15General

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Site. You may not transfer your rights under them; we may transfer ours as part of a transfer of the business.

Contact: maxpliskin1@gmail.com.