Examples:
Soul Bubbles on the left, Spirits on the right.
Same kind of universe, theme, mechanic around wind, both very well crafted by small teams. Soul Bubbles is anterior, being out on the DS in 2008. Spirit was out on the iPad November, 2010. Soul Bubbles HD will be out soon on it too.
It’s interesting because according to the team’s blog the idea behind Spirits was to do a Lemmings-like game. Soul Bubbles comes from a programmer and a designer doodling with a custom 2D physics engine and developing a game around it. One is a copy/paste with a twist, the other is a unique, fresh game. And that’s why it’s a better game, with a 10 pages thread of dedicated fans on Neogaf and unanimous critics.
Other case:
Radical Fishing on the left, Ninja Fishing on the right.
Here we have a blatant copy/paste with Radical Fishing being the first out, for free and being remade for Apple devices in order to cash in on develop’s work. Too bad, Ninja Fishing is out on this platform, “stealing” all the money.
What strikes me here is that it shows how games are all about mechanics and that tacky, not hip visuals are good enough, if you want to make a fun game and make money. Which is an important part in crafting, too.
So Daniel as often, is butthurting the industry. I agree with him because I’m kind of a romantic I guess. But I also don’t agree in the way that well, there’s no moral in business.
But Daniel has a point. Just in terms of settings and themes, I’m not even entering the world of game design. Just in these terms, you know we are lazy as fuck: heroic fantasy, Indiana Jones stuff, sci-fi and war, war, war. Don’t tell me that it’s what’s work, it’s a really bad argument, as Daniel points out:
We look at our current derivative behavior, acknowledge that it is harmful and then proceed to dogmatically justify its continued pursuit based off economic, legal, historical and short-term selfish reasons.
We just stay in our comfort zone over and over, game writers and reviewers included. Guys working on all these 3, 4, 5, 12 iterations of games love what they do, game writers can pull out tons of stuff about legacies and articles about series over and over and love that, nobody wants to change anything. And there’s a public for these games, end of the story. And end of the medium too.
A lot of people in the industry know this. The excellent Tale of Tales interview shows in the comments that it inspires people. Whatever you say, we need innovation and new games.
So if we go further and search for different game design ideas and mechanics and synthetize them, there’s a lot to do. How about the crazy sniper feature (100X zoom!) of MDK, mixed in a first person view AAA game about photography in a Laputa world? Ideas of games are so cheap, I’m surprised people don’t search a bit more. A Lot of projects get rejected in AAA studios because of risks involved in making them, I’m sure a lot of them are original and disregarded to death. Sigh.
What’s kind of depressing is that I get that 300 people in a game studio are going to do what they’re told to, but indies? VVVVV’s clone with a twist, really? If you’re doing something indie, you’re not making a living building polished iterations of a successful franchise, so why trying to copy so much? Why blatantly steal? What is up with this scummy mentality growing up with app stores? Geez.
Incestuous industry is incestuous. The amount of nostalgia through game writing and game developers on Twitter, is sickening. Nostalgia is bad for change. It feels like the game culture is all about celebrating the past and being really happy or really mad about the last iteration of [enter your game of choice here].
For a medium where we can do whatever the fuck we want, it’s disappointing. Again (I know, I repeat myself).