Terms of Service

Section 1 Acceptance of These Terms

By opening the website, following a link on it, submitting the contact form, or placing an order for professional work, you agree to be bound by these terms of service together with the privacy policy that sits beside this page. Reading the site is a simple act of acceptance: you agree that the site is supplied for information and for starting a conversation, not as a promise of a finished product by itself.

If you do not agree with any single term on this page, the honest course is to stop using the site and to reach us directly with your question before any order is placed. A disagreement left unspoken rarely helps either side, so we would rather answer one careful question than begin a project on a misunderstanding that could have been cleared in a minute.

These terms may be updated from time to time. The version that governs an order is the one printed on the date the order was accepted, while the version that governs simple browsing is the one live on the site at the moment you open a page.

Section 2 The Company Behind the Service

The service described in these terms is offered by the following registered company:

HAPPY CASTLE ANIMATION TECHNOLOGY CO., LIMITED Rm 1101D 11/F Lippo Sun Plaza, 28 Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong (HK)

The company works across the professional, scientific and technical services sector, with a speciality in computer systems design and related services. Its practical output covers computer integrated systems design for animation studios, for live media platforms and for engineering tooling. The developer name HappyCastle identifies the studio and answers to the registered company above.

Where these terms mention the studio, the company, or HappyCastle, they mean the same legal entity, because the developer name is only a friendly face for the firm that signs the paper and answers the calls.

Section 3 Eligibility to Use the Site

You may use this site if you are old enough under the law of your own region to form a binding contract, or if you act on behalf of a company or studio that is able to enter such a contract. By placing an enquiry on behalf of an organisation you confirm that you have the authority to bind that organisation to these terms.

We keep the site aimed at grown, professional audiences because the work and the gallery of tooling are built for people who run or make animation and software. Visitors who cannot form a contract may still read the public pages with a guardian nearby, but an order for paid work must come from a party able to accept responsibility for it.

Section 4 Use of the Website

We give you a personal, non exclusive, revocable permission to view and print the pages of this website for your own internal information and for honest enquiries about hiring us. You may save a copy of a page for your own records. You may not resell, reskin, rebrand or pass on the text and images of the site as if they were your own, and you may not scrape the site wholesale to feed another service.

You promise not to attack the site, to try to gain entry to parts you have no right to see, to send spam or hostile scripts through our forms, or to interfere with service for the genuine visitors who share the tower with you. A person who breaches this promise forfeits the right to keep using the site, and we may report serious abuse to the relevant authority.

The imagery of the workshop and the colour language of the site belong to us, and nothing on the pages hands you the right to reuse our craft simply because it was visible to your eyes.

Section 5 Proposals and Quotations

When you write to us about a project, we usually reply with a short note, then with a written proposal when the brief is real enough to price. A proposal sets out the scope, the schedule, the fee and the assumptions that sit underneath the number. Quotations and proposals are invitations to deal, not binding offers, and they stay valid for the period written on the paper or for thirty days, whichever is shorter.

No work begins until both parties sign a scope of work or accept a written proposal that names the deliverables and the fee. An email exchange that says yes to the stated scope counts as a binding contract for the purpose of these terms. Until that acceptance lands, we hold the door open but no obligation has been created on either side beyond the mutual duty to act honestly.

Section 6 Project Scope and Deliverables

Every project is described in a scope of work that lists the deliverables we agree to produce. A typical deliverable in our field may be a pipeline blueprint, a set of rigging controls, a render farm plan, a packaged interactive experience, or a data model for a game asset platform. The scope also states the formats in which the files will be handed over and the level of documentation that rides along.

Work that falls outside the written scope is considered extra work, priced separately at our then current rates, unless the scope itself says clearly that certain extras are included. We will always flag extra work before we spend your money, so you never see a surprise on an invoice that we could have predicted and chosen to mention.

We deliver the result in the state our craft and the agreed time allow, and we test it against the acceptance criteria named in the scope. If no criteria are named, the deliverable is accepted when it meets the plain description on the order and runs without a fault that stops its intended use.

Section 7 Fees, Invoicing and Payment

Fees are stated in the currency shown on the proposal, and they exclude any sales tax, value added tax or similar charge that applies under your local law, unless we agree in writing that a stated price is inclusive. Invoices are issued according to the payment schedule in the scope, which often holds a deposit to open the work and a balance on delivery.

We generally ask for part of the fee before a long project begins, because a serious scope demands committed calendar time. Outstanding invoices are due within the net number of days printed on the bill. If a payment falls late, work may pause on the open deliverable until the account is settled, and interest may accrue at the rate allowed by law, though we prefer a calm call over any penalty before trouble grows.

Every invoice names the studio, the project and the exact amount, so you always know precisely what a figure stands for. If a bill looks wrong, tell us within fourteen days and we will recheck it honestly; silence past that window marks the bill as agreed.

Section 8 Intellectual Property and Ownership

Unless we agree in writing to the opposite, each party stays the owner of the work it created before the project began and of its general craft, its process knowledge and its way of doing things. The specific deliverables that a client pays us to build are owned by the client once the fee is settled in full, and we assign to the client our rights in those finished deliverables for the agreed purpose.

We keep a licence to reuse the reusable parts of our own craft. That means a pipeline helper or a piece of dashboard code that is not unique to your project may be improved and sold to another studio later, provided it never exposes your confidential art, your shows or your private data. If a client needs an exclusive result with no reuse at all, we can offer that as a separate term for an agreed price.

This section does not transfer ownership of our website, our brand, our name HappyCastle, or our internal tools. It transfers the rights that belong to the written deliverables of a paid project, and nothing more.

Section 9 Client Materials and Confidential Material

To build your project we may need to see your artwork, your show bible, your assets, your source files or your logins to systems that hold your production data. You give us permission to use those materials only for the project we agreed, and you accept that you must have the right to hand those materials to us in the first place.

Both sides treat everything learned through the project as confidential. We keep your unreleased art and your production numbers behind locked doors, we limit who may see them, and we return or destroy them when the project ends if they are not part of the delivered work. This duty of confidence survives the end of the engagement.

You promise that any material you send us is lawful to use, does not break another party rights, and does not carry any secret that would harm a third party if it were seen. If material arrives that we have no permission to hold, we will ask you to take it back and will not build business around it.

Section 10 Licenses for Published Tooling

From time to time we publish a free tool, a plugin, a pipeline snippet or an example pack on this site or in an open archive. Each published item is released under the licence that ships inside its own files, and that licence alone governs your right to run, change and share it. Where no separate licence is present, the open source licence named in the download page applies.

Published open tools are supplied as they are, without any warranty of fitness, and we accept no liability for harm that comes from running them. They are shared to be useful and to be improved, but they do not carry the same guarantees as a deliverable built for a named client under a paid scope of work.

Section 11 Your Responsibilities as a Client

Good software and good animation are built on a heap of clear decisions, and those decisions often sit with you. You are responsible for supplying accurate briefs, for approving key frames and milestones on time, for handing us the assets and access we asked for, and for naming the one person with authority to sign off the work so that reviews do not circle forever.

A project that waits on your review is a project that waits. We build our schedule around the replies you promise in the scope, and if a long silence blocks our lane we will tell you and may pause the open phase without penalty to us. Speed and polish both need your answers to arrive when the plan expects them.

You also carry a duty to keep your own systems safe: protect your accounts, back up your own originals, and never share a credential that lets a stranger into the shared project space. We protect the space on our side; please protect your side of the same wall.

Section 12 Change and Revision Requests

Nearly every real project changes a little on the way to the cut. Small, reasonable revisions that fall inside the agreed scope are absorbed to keep the process civil. Requests that shift the goalposts, that ask for a new deliverable, or that rework an approved milestone are change requests, and they are priced and scheduled as such before we lift a pencil.

To keep surprises rare, we write a milestone into the plan and treat approval of it as a green light for the next phase. If you need to pivot after approval, we are glad to help, and we will give you a straight note about what the turn costs in time and money rather than hiding it in a later surprise.

Section 13 Schedules, Delays and Unforeseen Events

We treat the dates in a scope as a real promise, made after a careful look at the real work. Where a date must move, we tell you early and give you the new honest date, because a studio that hides a slip only borrows trouble from tomorrow. Neither side is liable for delay caused by events outside its reasonable control, such as a natural disaster, a general network outage, or a failure of a public cloud that we rely on as a helper.

When an unforeseen event strikes, both sides look for the calm path forward: shifting the schedule, using a backup route, or pausing the least urgent part of the work. If a force majeure event runs past a reasonable window and no path forward remains, either side may end the affected part of the project with return of the unused portion of any prepaid fee.

Section 14 Warranties and Disclaimers

We warrant that we will carry out paid work with reasonable skill and care, that the deliverables will match their written description, and that we have the right to assign the ownership named in the ownership section. If a delivered item falls short of that promise, we will repair it at our own cost within a reasonable time, and that repair is the first remedy for a fault.

Beyond the promises above, the public pages of this site are supplied as they are, without any warranty, and nothing on the site is a promise of a particular product being available or of a particular outcome for your own project. Tools we publish as open source carry the limited warranty stated in their own licence and no other. We do not warrant that the site will run without interruption, because a moment of maintenance or a fault beyond our control may always visit a living web property.

Section 15 Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, neither party is liable to the other for lost profits, loss of data, loss of business opportunity, or for indirect or consequential damage that arises from the project or from using the site. Our total responsibility for a paid project, whatever the cause, is capped at the amount actually paid for that project in the twelve months before the claim arose.

This cap does not remove liability the law refuses to let us hide, such as liability for death or injury caused by our own carelessness, or for fraud. In short, we stand fully behind the serious consequences of our own fault, and we keep our risk at a fair, intelligible figure for everything else that a production project can occasionally throw at a team.

Section 16 Termination and Suspension

A paid project can be ended by either party on written notice. If you end the work before it is delivered, you pay for the phases completed and for the reasonable costs of stopping work cleanly, and you receive whatever interim deliverables were finished and paid for. If we end the project because you broke a serious promise, such as refusing to pay or misusing our confidential material, we will give you notice and a short window to put the matter right before we stop.

When a project ends, the duties that are meant to survive carry on: confidentiality, our rights to the reusable craft, your rights to the paid deliverables, and the sections about payment for completed work. Ending a project is the closing of one chapter, not the forgetting of every promise made across its pages.

Section 17 Data and Security Commitments

During a project we may process your production data and the personal data of your staff. We hold that data under the rules of our privacy policy and under the deeper promises of a data agreement where one is needed. We keep encryption on the road and on the shelf, we limit the people who hold a key, and we never sell a client data store for any reason.

We back up the shared project space, we check that the backups can be restored, and we watch logs for the smoke signals that warn of trouble early. If a breach ever touches your data, we will tell you with candour rather than with delay, and we will explain what each of us should do next to limit the damage and to keep the show on the road.

Section 18 Governing Law, Disputes and Contact

These terms are governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. If a dispute cannot be settled by friendly talk and, where useful, by mediation, the parties agree that the courts of Hong Kong have jurisdiction to hear the matter. Most disagreements we ever meet dissolve in a plain conversation, so we always begin there before any legal step.

For any question about these terms, an order, or a project, reach the studio at the channels below. We answer every serious message, and we would always rather clear a doubt in writing than let it grow into a second doubt.

HAPPY CASTLE ANIMATION TECHNOLOGY CO., LIMITED Rm 1101D 11/F Lippo Sun Plaza, 28 Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong (HK) Email: info@happycastle.lol Phone: +19832251964