07/22

Announcing Ridiculous Fishing Prematurely ¶

Well it looks like I can finally announce that I’m working on a game called Ridiculous Fishing (Radical Fishing for iOS) with Zach Gage and Vlambeer. Working with Vlambeer and Zach has been awesome so far. They wanted me to do whatever I wanted with the art style and I had a ball with that kind of freedom. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d come up with something that was a good fit but after some toiling early on I struck on a cool 45degree/90degree pixel grid thingy in Illustrator and fell in love. The rest of the team dug it too and we were off!

As for the game, Ridiculous Fishing will feature a boatload [heyooo!] more achievements, areas and other cool stuff that we’ll keep under the hood until release. The core design will be the same as Radical Fishing but the controls and game will be a lot more immersive on iOS devices. We’re really pumped for the game and I can’t wait to show you more, so here:

So there you have it, stay posted for updates and so on but there’s a bit more to this post that I really want to get off my chest. Specifically the “prematurely” part of this announcement. Basically we’re announcing this news before we’re ready to because a quasi-clone of Radical Fishing has been announced for iOS. It’s called Ninja Fishing and it’s a game that appears to play exactly like Radical Fishing but includes a ninja with a sword instead of a fisherman with a gun. When we saw the footage, our hearts sank because we knew we wouldn’t get it done in time to be first-to-market. Now I don’t want to get into the larger debate of patents and all that nonsense. Game design is game design and should influence others and be built upon. I understand that everything is a remix of everything that has come before it and there is no such thing as a purely original idea if you examine it deeply enough.

But what I do want to talk about is money. This is about money, and making it as an indie shop in a huge ocean of competition. Vlambeer is a couple guys from the Netherlands, almost indentical to Mike and I, who are trying to scrape together a game development studio independently. It’s really fucking hard. It took Mikengreg about 3 years of incubation and living well below a burger flipper’s wage to come to a point where we didn’t have to work every waking hour of the day to pay rent.

¶

Early, we made our living making free flash games that we would sell for sponsorship. Usually the sponsorship was a lump sum type of payday and we would then take that money and pay our bills while working on the next game that would hopefully net a little bit more, leap-frogging these games while becoming better at making them. That worked to some degree but never truly got easier until we put out our first iOS game, Solipskier. Now we had people paying us “directly” for a product and we were introduced to the concept of a revenue stream. It offered us stability, a decent quality of life (compared to before) and moreover, a way to make a much cooler game the next go-round.

That was all great and we didn’t encounter much resistance along the way. In fact we were very fortunate because we showed it to our awesome indie friends, one of which got us in contact with Apple and they featured us in the New & Noteworthy section. But it didn’t come without sacrifice. We did a simultaneous release of the Flash version of Solipskier alongside the iOS version to ensure that cloners wouldn’t take a second look at beating us to the market. But to do that we had to make an entirely new game, Liferaft: Zero, during Solipskier’s iOS development and sell it before it was ready so we could get the money to pay rent. It was a really tough decision, we made the right call no doubt, but that situation was highly stressful due purely to our financial situation.

Vlambeer took a very similar path as a company, making flash games which they got sponsored to pay their bills in order to make the next game. In fact before they started their company they contacted us and we shared with them how we made a living at making these small flash games (Solipskier iOS handn’t been released yet). Those numbers convinced them that they could do it too, so they started Vlambeer. Out popped Radical Fishing, then they went to market with Super Crate Box and so on. But in the meantime Gamenauts saw Radical Fishing and decided that it was ripe for the picking. Vlambeer would then make Luftrauser to pay more bills and continue making games while Gamenauts sets out to HDify the Radical Fishing design with an all-too-familiar-middle-of-the-road-McDonalds-hamburger art style. Sure the art is different but it’s just a prettier, more labored-over version of Radical Fishing’s original art… with an obese ninja.

So my point is not that Gamenauts is doing something illegal or that original creators should be able to lock down design with patents or other nonsense, my point is about common decency and the little guy getting fucked over by a studio that is both creatively and morally bankrupt. This kind of thing is so common today that flash developers, essentially doing R&D for anyone that cares to watch, expect this kind of excrement to rain down on them if they wait too long, furthering the anxiety of making games on your own without a safety net.

It’s very easy to browse the internet, play games all day and find one that will work on a platform like iOS. But why support the people that are so disconnected to the art of making video games that they fear changing too much of the original game they are “inspired by” as to make it distinguishable from the original? Why can’t the game be about an alien construction worker in a huge drilling machine plunging into an endless concrete skyscraper to retrieve office materials/workers/computers then tossing them into the sky and picking them out of the air with nail guns? I came up with that just now on the spot and it took me about 30 seconds. They didn’t change the theme because they have no idea, really, why the game was successful in the first place. And if they do, they certainly have no clue how to reach it on their own, in earnest. If they change too much about a game they are to ripoff, it might not have everything in it that made it a success in the first place and this is all about capitalizing (monetarily) on Vlambeer’s creativity and prowess as top-shelf game designers. Nothing more.

It’s complete bullshit and nobody with this knowledge should stand for it. You can be “right” with whatever counterpoint you want to make on the subject. “It’s futile to fight it, cloning and all its forms will always happen so just fold it into your plans.” “It’s a slippery slope trying to protect ideas and designs, where does it end?” Sure that’s fine. You’re right. But this isn’t the supreme court. Complacency and etc. contributes to the fact that this means it’s a HELL of a lot harder to make it as an indie game designer on this path of freeware->iOS that could work so well for so many talented, aspiring game developers. It can keep victims of this nonsense in the hobbyist category, or just below the comfort level of being able to live a decent life. The people that ought to be rewarded monetarily for their spirit and creativity cannot simply work hard and produce beautiful things. Cloning will never end, but that doesn’t mean we should be silent about it and accept cloners “crediting” us for “inspiration.” It’s extremely insulting.