The first round of press is out for Incredipede and people are reacting really positively! The trailer made it to Reddit’s front page and I’m super excited about that! The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and I’ve gotten a bunch of very friendly emails. In short: things are going great! But here’s the thing: even though things are going great a fear lurks in the back of my mind. I fear Internet people.
When I made Fantastic Contraption there was a big positive ruckus of people. It was amazing and wonderful. But for the life of me I couldn’t bring myself to engage with it. There’s something about the weight of hundreds of people (virtual or not) that threatens to smother me. So for Fantastic Contraption I hired my good friend Andy Moore to talk to people for me. He did a great job but he’s moved on to writing his own games now.
This time around I am determined to not run from the challenge. I will try really hard to respond to everyone’s comments, put myself out there and talk about the game. That’s a big reason that this blog exists in the first place.
You can find the trailer and some information over at Incredipede.com.
I unveiled the game at Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. Sense of Wonder Night is a great showcase of odd, interesting games. It aims to capture the audiences imagination with new and wondrous ideas. It stands in contrast to the main expo hall of the Tokyo Game Show which is filled with your typical big-budget low-risk AAA games.
SOWN was an amazing experience! I shared the stage with 10 other really great games. You can find the full list here. One of the great things about being indie is that we’re all looking out for each other. There is no feeling of competition in the indie games world. The general feeling is that if one person’s game does well then that will just bring more players into the scene. That makes indie events like this really really fun. That, and the fact that interesting games tend to be made by interesting people.
SOWN was very well organised by Kiyoshi Shin, president of the IGDA in Japan. The show started at 5:30pm but we first met up at 1:00. We all met, shook hands, and most importantly all tried out our presentations on the hardware we’d be using. We also met our translators who were very friendly and professional. They wanted a loose script for each presentation and while I had one ready some other teams had to write one up. From there we kind of split up. The reflow and Playism guys and us headed down to the expo to check out some games (the guys from Playism showed Inside a Star Filled Sky because Jason Rohrer couldn’t make it).
We bee-lined it for the Playism booth. They had a bunch of great games to play. The two that I happened to land in front of were Celestial Mechanica and Lume which you really have to go check out if you haven’t played them.
We wandered back to the set-up room where the Solstice and then the Eufloria guys both did dry runs of their presentations with us as an audience. They both went well, but they were both better at the actual event. I guess having a proper audience makes you more focused :)
I got to play Solstice after their dry run. It looks fun when you watch someone play but spectating doesn’t do it justice. It’s a wonderful experience to play it yourself. I haven’t played many kinect games but this is the first one I’ve really liked. The immersive feeling of flight is really strong. If these guys really push through their ideas they’re going to get an amazing game out of it.
After that it was time to go to the show room. Kiyoshi Shin walked us through the order and how the evening would flow, we all got our “quackers“, and they started letting in the crowd.
I’m not made very nervous about public speaking but over the last hours and days a fair amount of nervous energy had built up. I did some push-ups to try to burn it off but mostly I just got jittery and itched to get it over with. Unfortunately I was going last so I would have to wait two hours before I could release all the pent up tension. By the time my turn came my jittery body had just exhausted itself and I was filled with an unexpressable tension. But when it came time to get up there whatever part of my brain handles public speaking took over and everything went pretty well. Tell me what you think:
Finishing the talk was a nice rush. All the tension melted away and the crowd loved the game. I think Sarah was more nervous than I was and it was great to walk back to her beaming face. After the wrap up we all headed downstairs for some free booze. By the time we got there all the beer had been taken so we were stuck with bad whisky and wine until Kiyoshi Shin brought around some Asahi he managed to scrounge somewhere, I have no idea where he could have found it.
The Playism guys live in japan so, naturally, after the SOWN party they hooked us up with the Karaoke. About 20 of us rented out a big private karaoke room down the street and partied the night away. That bit’s a little hazy but I’m pretty sure it was amazingly fun. All in all it was a pretty wondrous night.
The game I’ve been working on for the last six months is going to be shown at the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show! This will be the first public unveiling of Incredipede. Currently only a few friends and family have played it.
In keeping with this non-announcement there is no trailer, no screenshots, and no description of the game.
Stay tuned though. All will be made clear on Friday September 16th at SOWN! We’re flying to Tokyo!
I, like many of my Indie brethren, hate Cloners. I honestly believed that this would not be a controversial opinion but I was wrong. A surprising number of people think that clones are a-o.k. Their arguments for thinking cloned are a-o.k. are oft repeated. Whenever someone writes an article about shitty cloners cloning some game the same arguments tend to crop up. Since I’ve heard them so many times I figured I would respond to all of them in one place. Maybe this way I’ll stop being tempted to wade in to every hundred comment debate-wasteland on cloning.
If you don’t know what cloning is or want a primer you can read Sarah’s post on the subject. It has some great specific examples.
Rebuild vs Chinese clone Rebuild
Arguments for cloning:
1: Everything is a Clone!
Here is the big one. This is the most commonly used argument that clones are fine. It is simple. The argument is that game development is equivalent to cloning. Many of the great games in history are simply clones of something else. Some of the most popular examples are: Doom = Heretic = Rise of the Triad, Dune 2 = Warcraft, Infiniminer = Minecraft.
The problem with this argument is: no they aren’t! All of those games have significant changes to their game design. Maybe you’ve never actually played these games? Maybe time has made you forget how different they are from eachother, but they are not clones! They are similar, but not clones! But ha! Where do you draw the line between similar and clone? Well that’s argument number 2.
2: It’s a Fuzzy Line So There’s No Such Thing
Where is the line between clone and honest iterative improvement? I don’t know precisely where the line is. I can’t mathematically define it. I can’t write down a definition of the line. But that doesn’t really matter because so many clones are way over the line. I don’t have to know exactly where the line is to know that a lot of these horrible clones are on the wrong side of it. They are so aggressively cloney they never even imagined there was a line to consider. I can see arguing about whether a specific example is or isn’t over the line. But I can’t understand arguing that the line doesn’t exist because it’s fuzzy.
FarmTown vs FarmVille
3: We’re Going to be Sued Into Oblivion!
Many of us are not calling for new laws. Our societies haven’t really figured out how to protect intellectual property. It’s a hard problem and the Indie game community doesn’t have anywhere near the required heft to make laws happen anyway. So since laws aren’t going to happen there’s no reason to worry about that dark dystopian future. But that doesn’t mean cloning isn’t reprehensible. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it moral (I’m sure no one is going to argue with me on that point).
4: You Deserved to get Cloned
If someone can write your game better than you or serve a market you aren’t serving then good for them. You deserve to get cloned.
We’re working on it dude! We’re trying to get our iPhone versions out but it takes some time. Especially since, unlike the cloners, we have to babysit the original release and might have to assemble a small team to make the new version. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The cloners strength is getting something shipped. Our strength is inventing something elegant and fun. You can’t let us starve or you will lose your source of elegant and fun.
Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes
5. Game Design Has No Value
So here’s the one that really gets me. This one feels like people spitting in my face. It often comes out as “they changed the graphics so it’s fine” or “it’s more polished so they deserved it”. I love game design. I’m writing a game right now that I am in love with. It’s new, it’s crazy, it’s fun (hopefully!). I spent two years prototyping stuff before I had this idea. I have since spent nine months working on it and a lot of that time has been spent trying to design it. I think about game design obsessively. I have done major rewrite after major rewrite to try to discover how to make this game work. I theorise, I code, I playtest, I start over. It is really really hard to design a fun new game.
I think part of why people think it’s easy is because a good game is (ideally) simple and elegent. Since most people have never tried to design a game they don’t really know what’s involved. You will hear the phrase “the best ideas are the simple ones aren’t they?” and that’s true. But what that phrase doesn’t capture is the immense amount of work it takes to chisel a horrible lump of granite into something simple and elegent.
If you think it’s o.k. for someone to lift 2 years of my work, slap a panda on it, and beat me to the iPhone then you are a massive dick.
Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets
6. It’s Everywhere and There’s No Way to Stop It
It is everywhere and it always has been. Dirty damned cloners have always existed. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have an effect. If everyone in the world hated cloners then there would be fewer clones. People tend to avoid taking jobs that will make them seem like assholes to their peers. People don’t tend to buy things that morally outrage them. If we just keep stating our case reasonably and passionately we can make a difference to the culture of games. The only thing you hear more than “cloners will always exist” is “video games are a young medium”.
Last week someone released a knockoff of Rebuild for the iPad. When I contacted them, the publisher politely said it was a mistake and took it down immediately, but it reminded me of what’s at stake if I take my time with the sequel (which will come out for iPad as well as Flash).
It also got me thinking about the topic of clone games, which have always bothered me, but I find it hard to pin down exactly what constitutes a clone and why I find them offensive. The conversation tends to gets heated when the topic comes up, but I think it’s important that we talk about it all the same. It’s going to buzz around my brain until I do so I decided to look at some examples and ask some questions.
Rebuild vs Knockoff Rebuild
The Rebuild clone is an extreme case and it’s been taken down, but I’d like to start with it. The gameplay was the same, the art was better but strikingly similar and the events were rewritten in different words. Perfectly legal, except that they named it “Rebuild” which was probably an accident. I think it’s crazy that someone could spend so much effort to produce a beautiful and polished game while skipping the fun part of designing the gameplay. I imagine profit must be the only motive, but I’m not sure. I am sure that it shouldn’t have been legal.
There are good reasons why you can’t copyright gameplay. Gameplay is hard to define, and borrowing ideas from earlier games is an important part of how genres evolve. I agree, it would suck if someone owned the copyright on aiming with a mouse, or levelling-up a character, or if Square Enix could sue you for using the FFVII class system in your vector-based robot platformer. I’m happy anyone can iterate and expand on ideas from other games, but there’s a difference between that and being a total, shameless knockoff.
Clones are like porn: you know it when you see it.
Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets
After Colin wrote Contraption, he started negotiations for an iPhone port with a developer but it fell through when Colin realised the deal they offered was rediculously out of scope with the industry standard. Three months later they released a nearly exact clone of Colin’s game with a pretty graphical makeover, almost beating our real port to the iPhone market (free tip: before you deal with someone see how many outstanding law suits are pending against them). Apple didn’t take it down, but (with our publisher inExile’s help) they did feature us and the clone got buried.
The situation was unusual because Colin new the cloner and suspects they’d already started on the game (as an official Contraption port) before negotiations collapsed. It might have held up in court if it had been worth suing over, but I’m really glad we didn’t have to find out.
Don’t rely on Apple to make any moral decisions regarding knockoffs. They’ll take something off the App Store if it violates copyright, ie if it uses your name or characters or graphics, but they’re slow and don’t reply whether they decide to act or not.
Tetris vs Brick Game
Possibly the most cloned game ever, Tetris, has been beset with copyright problems since the get-go. Knockoffs show up everywhere from naughty versions on xxx sites to “9999 in 1 Russia Brick Game” handhelds at dollar stores. Last month the company that owns Tetris sent Google a DMCA notice regarding 35 games on the Android market which were all promptly removed. Some of them used the word “Tetris” which is unarguably illegal, but many just had similar gameplay.
It’s interesting that this sue-happy company can so easily throw their weight around to enforce copyright on a 30 year old title. I guess the system does work for some people. But I wonder if Tetris is so well known that it should be considered a genre in itself, gameplay in the public domain. Did any of the unauthorized games combine new and interesting concepts with our beloved block game?
FarmTown vs FarmVille
Facebook games all look the same, to someone uninterested in spamming her friends every time she grows a tomato. Talk about shameless mimicry! Consider Zynga‘s multi-billion dollar line of clones: FarmVille, PetVille, Café World, Mafia Wars. They wait for a game to be successful, copy it to a T, then aim their firehose of players at it – ka-ching! They must have a strong sense of irony, because now Zynga’s threatening to sue people for using “-ville” in their game names.
Granted, they’re not the only ones at it, and Zynga is spectacularly good at optimizing games to maximize virality and revenue. Did FarmTown lose money when it got cloned, or did the sudden popularity of farming games bring them new players? Is there room in a player’s feed for two (or three, or four) such similar games?
Minecraft vs Fortresscraft
Microsoft just announced that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. This must be a disappointment to the creators of top-selling XBLIG game FortressCraft, one of the most recent in the genre of “first person multiplayer voxel art mining sandbox roguelikes”. Unlike the owners of Tetris, Notch has no intention of suing, in part because he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on: Minecraft started as a self-admitted clone of Infiniminer (by Zachary Barth, creator of SpaceChem).
You could argue that the world wouldn’t have discovered this new genre if Minecraft hadn’t picked up after Infiniminer was cancelled and iterated on it to make a really great game. On the other hand, the graphical similarities are so obvious it’s embarassing. Barth says he’s flattered that his game design has become so popular, and leaves it at that.
Crush the Castle vs Angry Birds
Angry Birds has been in the App Store top 3 for over a year and has made over 70 million dollars. Apple constantly features the game because it’s in their interest to have fewer, more popular games whose household names might intice people to buy an iPhone or iPad. Few games get into the top 10 and they tend to stay there, which makes developing for the iPhone kind of like playing a slot machine.
As you probably suspected, Angry Birds’ gameplay was copied from a Flash game called Crush The Castle. The difference this time is that Angry Birds used a completely different look, having you whimsically toss suicidal birds at pigs instead of cannonballs at armored men. It feels good, it sound good, and it’s obvious why even our parents are playing this game.
Is it innovation if you just change the setting? I know I wouldn’t have been so miffed at the Rebuild clone if you were fighting aliens on a moon base instead of zombies in an identical looking city.
WaveSpark vs Tiny Wings
In another case of innovation via higher production values, top-selling iPhone game Tiny Wings is far, far more polished than an earlier game WaveSpark which used the same gameplay. WaveSpark was created as part of a project to write a different game every week, and the creator Nathan McCoy didn’t spend a lot of time making it look good. It goes to show that polish pays. So do cute birds.
It seems that’s what players care about, as McCoy’s request for credit was met with jeering at his game’s simple graphics. I’m hesitant to call Tiny Wings a clone, but I’d like to see developers (and fans) give credit to games that inspired theirs. Do they not for fear of being sued?
Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes
QCF Design has finally started preorders for Desktop Dungeons, and last week they briefly had a beta version of the game online (I’m bummed I missed it). They’re being secretive for good reason: they’ve been burned before.
They started off releasing alpha versions of the game as they were writing it, incorporating feedback from the community and growing a tidy fan base. Then one such fan released an iPhone game copying Desktop Dungeons’ gameplay right down to the classes and spell names. After months of friendly but fruitless discussions between the two developers, QCF finally brought in their lawyer and spoke publicly about the situation. The cloner relented and graciously took his game down.
He didn’t seem like a bad guy. He just wanted to make a good game, and Desktop Dungeons was a good game. But releasing it before the original was even finished? Ouch.
SimCity vs Rebuild
I’m just kidding about this comparison, but SimCity was one of the inspirations for my game. So was X-Com and zombie movies like 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead. Like I said, all games borrow from other games and I’m happy they can.
I know I’ve gotten all high and mighty, but there’s a line that gets crossed too often. It just ain’t right, and something needs to change! If the law can’t help and distributors like Apple won’t help, at least players can have an effect by respecting the creators of original gameplay and not buying the knockoffs. Or at least give credit where it’s due and play the original games too.
Colin notes that the real tragedy is that the cloners aren’t just stealing a good idea. They are stealing refined, thought out game design that might have taken years to make work. It takes much less risk to just steal great gameplay and polish up the graphics.
Good thing there will always be foolish indie developers who are more interested in making something cool than simply making money.
