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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

When we were in Honduras last year we had a pretty crappy Internet connection. It was pretty slow and we had to pay for our bandwidth by the meg. When you pay by the meg suddenly podcasts and torrents are less fun. Fortunately there were a few indie games I sucked a lot of fun out of. They kept me entertained for days and all they asked for was a few megs of bandwidth.

One of those games was BrainSplode! by Rich Edwards. BrainSplode! isn’t even a proper game. It’s just a prototype. But it’s so good it drives me crazy that Rich is continuing to prototype stuff rather than just double down on BrainSplode!.

You can think of it as a game about programmable howitzer shells. I like it for a couple of reasons. One is because it is incredibly, rediculously fun. Another is that you can so easily enumerate the complexity of BrainSplode!.

I will give a very brief description but you should really just go play it. Brain Splode! starts off as a very familiar ballistics game ala Scorched Earth or Crush the Castle. But it mixes in some Roborally/SpaceChem style programmable elements. Namely, you can chose to change the direction of the shell, fire off a booster rocket, pop a parachute, or any combination of these three actions at any time after the shell is fired. You do this by lining up three ‘actions’ to take before you fire the shell and then activate them in turn by pressing the mouse button.

As an example, I can fire the shell high and to the left, then I can make it face backwards, then I can fire off a booster rocket which sends it flying to the right and then pop a chute to slowly glide towards my final target.

BrainSplode! has something like 6 variables to play with. Two for the cannon, one for how I program the shell, one for how I set the direction changer (assuming I use one) and then another couple for when I choose to activate each action.

Since a lot of these variables are along a continuum and not discreet choices it’s hard to enumerate the total number of options available but we can easily see that the solution space is huge. In fact I think it’s too big. BrainSplode! is yet another game in a long series of games that I love but utterly fail at convincing my friends to play. I pestered everyone I knew and almost no one else finished BrainSplode!. I think that has to do with the complexity of the solution space.

There is some good empirical evidence that the two variables of the ballistics game on their own represent a comfortable level of complexity (Angry Birds). So I think BrainSplode! is stumbling outside the optimum complexity fun-zone. As an interesting experiment I’d like to try pushing it back into the fun-zone. Here’s how the experiment goes. You can play along at home.

1. Download BrainSplode!
2. Beat BrainSplode! normally.
3. Go back to level 7 and set the cannon to shoot up and left with minimum power (put the power meter in the very top left of the square). Now beat level 7 without moving the cannon.
4. Do the same for level 6.

You have to beat the game first because steps 3 and 4 are very hard (since the game isn’t designed with them in mind) and if you didn’t the difficulty curve would be way out of whack. By holding the cannon variables constant we push BrainSplode! back towards the optimal-fun zone where the complexity is more manageable. I think as players and designers we intuitively understand when something is too complex or not complex enough, but only after the fact. We pretty much have to build something and play it before we know if it needs more or less stuff glued onto it. Worse still after we’ve been living with a game for a while we lose perspective on the optimum complexity: “I have no problem understanding the game I’ve been making for 4 months, I don’t know why other people are having trouble”.

I’d love to understand the relationship between complexity and fun better. Mostly I find it an impenetrable fog. I’m always trying though and BrainSplode! is probably the most fun experimental complexity playground I’ve yet to find.

p.s. if you’re really looking for a BrainSplode! challenge I have two more for you:

– Try level 7 but with only one set of programed commands. You can use parachutes and rockets and everything, but you can only set them once  at the beginning and never change them. This includes the green change-angle power. You can use it but you must chose one angle at the very  beginning and never change it. You also have to leave the cannon locked in one place, but you can set it anywhere you like. No changes to  anything! (if you play RoboRally then think of it as having all your registers locked).

– Then try level 6 the same way.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in the world to get these ones. Even Rich shied away from these challenges. Happy ‘Sploding!