• In Defense of Hating Cloners

    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
    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
    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
    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
    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”.

  • Rebuild 2: Playtest and Playtomic

    The Rebuild 2 main menu
    The Rebuild 2 main menu may be the creepiest art in the game.

    The Rebuild 2 playtest is over and was a huge success. I sent the test out to 63 applicants, and of those 45 played at least once and 21 sent me some sort of useful feedback (and get their names in the credits – thanks guys!). A couple shared their access despite being explicitly asked not to, but it was worth the risk and I had some security to impede ne’er do wells. So far my faith in humanity is intact!

    Some testers were above-and-beyond awesome, playing lengthy games on multiple difficulties, finding all the endings and rooting out my many grammatical errors. They found dozens of bugs I’d missed, and helped me make Nightmare difficulty (now called Impossible) harder than ever.

    Being fans of Rebuild 1, they weren’t as good at finding noob issues, so I did some extra tests with people who’d never seen the original. In person is best for this, although I find it nerve racking to watch people play my games. Like every other aspect of the game, the tutorial got an overhaul.

    Stats broken down by day and difficulty
    Playtest stats broken down by day and difficulty

    I collected stats using Playtomic (formerly SWFStats), including the fact that a few games went 300, 500, even 800 days. That’s dedication!

    Playtomic wasn’t ideal for such a small test. I broke down the survivors, squares, and food by day and difficulty, but when I added map size it all got out of order and became a wall of numbers. I needed more options to sort and filter, or download the data in an xls. I also logged any errors as custom metrics, but without room for stack traces all I knew was how often each error happened. Again, not what Playtomic was designed for, but it would have been useful.

    What Playtomic does do well is analytics for published games, like Google Analytics but simpler and more game-centric. I wish I’d put something like it in Rebuild 1 so I could at least know how many plays that game has. 6 million confirmed on the big portals… maybe another 2 or 3 from the hundreds of smaller sites?

    Anyway, with help from my army of volunteer playtesters, Rebuild 2 is now (just about) finished, and is off to sponsors for bidding. The process usually takes a month, so you’ll finally all be able to play the new game in September!

    Until then, here’s a very brief Rebuild 2 trailer I cut together:

  • Rebuild Vancouver

    I am currently playtesting Rebuild 2 for difficulty. I decided to write up a first-person account of one of my games and post it for your amusement. Note that I am no writer so this is essentially just bad fanfiction. Although it _is_ fanfiction for an unreleased game. It was a pretty intense three hour playthrough so the original write-up was pretty long. Sarah cut it down for me but if you are a particular fan of  tortured prose you can read the un-cut-down version here.

    Also, minor spoiler alert.

     

    I remember when this city wasn’t a smoking terror-scape. I remember when it was the city of glass, the most beautiful city in the world. When you could sip an espresso or a pint of beer by the water without some brain-hungry Zed trying to liberate your frontal lobes. This is Vancouver damn it! And it’s where we start again!

    A few fellow survivors and I walled up a few blocks of the city and I knew there was an old science-lab a few blocks away. My plan was to rally all the downtrodden, scared stragglers to my banner and fight back against the zombie hordes.

    As our struggling fort started to grow, an itinerant gambler stopped by to gamble for food. I couldn’t help myself, I was blinded by hunger and played with what little we had. Fortunately I was lucky with the dice and nearly doubled our meagre supply of rations and won a kitten to boot! I taught the kitten to ride on my shoulder and Mooch became very useful for recruiting survivors to my cause.

    We were growing fast, and having trouble scavenging enough food from the surrounding grocers and 8-12 marts to feed everyone. I met an honest to god researcher named Rob earlier and he was keen to get to work. I set him on rigging up a radio to find more science minded people.

    One day, while most of us were away scavenging the ruined city for sustenance, the zombies got into the science-lab. Jimbob Foster and “Faraway” Boyle were first to the scene. They acted bravely but Jimbob was overcome and eaten alive. “Faraway” was injured trying to fend them off with a Bunsen burner and sent to recuperate in an old hospital.

    Heroic efforts to gather food farther and farther from the fort were keeping us alive. We were also bringing back some pretty interesting stuff from those missions. Julia Jenkins brought back a sub-machine gun from an old pawn shop, and later found herself a shotgun.

    It took nearly a week to bring the lab back under control, then just as it was an old man with a thick Russian accent came to the doors of the fort. Dr. Bryukhonenko said he could do more damage to the zombies with science than we could with bats and rifles. He wanted our lab to himself though. Honestly, Rob wasn’t exactly a specialist before the world fell and I had more hope in this confident stranger, so I gave him the lab. Soon after that he demanded Nurse Betty to be his assitant. She wasn’t the most adept of Rob’s trainees, but she was definitely the best looking.

    I was obsessed with drawing in new people. When my scouting parties found someone I’d take Mooch out there and talk them into my vision of the future. I may have played up the safety and comfort of the fort more than was realistic but if we were going to win back our city it was necessary.

    We still couldn’t feed everyone and people were losing faith in my leadership. To keep morale up I ordered that a few churches on our borders be cleaned out and walled off.
    I preached not of hell; it was evident for all that hell was real. Instead I preached of new cars and bad TV on a Sunday afternoon, of eating lunch on Granville Island and the functioning ski-lifts on Grouse Mountain. I made them yearn for what we had lost and slowly they came back to me.

    While this going on I was getting odder and odder reports from Rob about what Dr. Bryukhonenko was up to. Rob said his methods weren’t safe or necessarily moral.
    I didn’t care what methods the doctor used. As the zombies massed outside the walls I feared he was our only real hope.

    The doctor often made odd demands, and the fort didn’t much like him. There were often strange noises coming from his lab but strange turned to disturbing then to terrifying. It was enough that people had to daily confront hunger and the zombies outside. That’s why when the lab exploded I was the only one who was devastated.

    I sent Campbell and a few other soldiers in there to clean up. They found Dr. Bryukhonenko and Betty’s bodies in the wreckage but also the doctor’s notes. Devastated, I sent the notes to Rob in the vain hope he could make sense of the Russian scribbles.

    I had no idea what to do now. There might be other options out of this. I could could try to start a government and make a proper city work despite the constant threat of zombies. I might be able to overpower some of the raiders and free us from some of the constant danger. There was an airfield in the city. I might have been able to wing myself and a few close survivors away to find… help… or a little tropical island somewhere. Someone might as well end up well from this escapade.

    Then Rob came to me in the night. He said he’d cracked it! Bryukhonenko had found a cure. He said I didn’t want to know the lengths the doctor had gone to finding it. I’m amazed at what someone with no moral compunction can accomplish. Rob said the team needed ten days and three labs to prepare the cure. “Faraway” reclaimed the exploded lab.

    I was on top of the world when Rob and his crew stated their work. We were 34 survivors now well fed, well trained, and well housed. We had the zombies at bay and soon this nightmare would be over. I wasn’t prepared for the zombie’s response. It was like they knew their time was near and they started massing into huge hordes and hurling themselves against the walls every couple of days. They took our farms, our police station and were eating their way towards the lab. At this closest of moments, when I saw my impossible dream finally falling into place the hordes of Zed were set to tear down everything we had accomplished.

    Which brings me to today: May fourth, 2014. 103 days after I decided we were going to start anew. Today’s the day Rob said he’d be done. I can hear Zed moaning their request for our living flesh. I don’t have many healthy fighters to answer their request.

    I hope to god Rob has found a better answer for them…

  • Rebuild 2: Guess who

    The Dream Team
    The Dream Team: Derek Yu, David Hellman, Tiff Chow, Steph Thirion

    You really may have to guess, as the face modelling doesn’t always produce a perfect match. But I’ve been having fun putting my friend’s faces into the game with the FaceGen Modeller, then mix-and-matching their hair and facial hair.

    Terrifying new art from EvilKris
    Terrifying new art from EvilKris

    The major components are all in, and I’m starting to slog through balancing now. In the end, some stuff still didn’t make it in, but Rebuild 2 is closer to what I imagined the original should have been. I hope you’ll agree!

    I’ll probably do some private testing soon so if you’d like to be considered for test duty, please leave a comment on this post.

    Edit: the playest is over, thanks everyone for helping out!

  • Rebuild 2: Progress Continues

    EvilKris and I have been working hard on Rebuild 2. Skills and plots are in with about 30 other changes, and there’s another 20 to go. Recent additions include renaming survivors, saving in multiple slots, shotguns, helicopters, prostitution, and more kittens.

    There are also new buildings and I tweaked the map art to use more gradients and textures. I’m still working on the blood bar; need to make room for more information up there. It’s still pretty similar but here’s how it looks today:

    New buildings in Rebuild 2
    New buildings in Rebuild 2

    EvilKris is nearly done the new attack screen art, small illustrations to go with various events and possible outcomes. These will be in a kind of a comic book style, hopefully not too gruesome for the squeamish but showing a more realistic depiction of life in the land of the dead. He has more art on his blog.

    EvilKris's attack screen vignettes
    EvilKris's attack screen vignettes