I defend creation and the intellectual freedom of those to pursue the creations they desire. I personally don't believe in restricting creation because someone else thought of it first. Derivative work litters history (See: Calculus) and there are arguments here to defending fangames.

I never read "Thou shalt not make fan-games" in the United American Bill of Constitutions. Our fondling fourfathers had no problem with it so I don't see where BYOND gets off having a problem with it.

Lugia319 wrote:

The ONLY thing that you do by following an existing IP is that you give yourself a framework and set rules to go by.

You also give yourself free advertising.

Back on topic, I never had the experience of transitioning from fan-game to original-game because I was never interested in making a fan-game. And although I agree that there's nothing inherently wrong about making fan-games, I think it's sort of a waste of time. Once you have completed your fan game, you can't really tell anyone you made "a game." It's always gonna be "a fan game" meaning it's not completely yours.

The thing I never understood about fan-game developers is why it's so difficult for them to... not make a fan-game. They act like they can't make a game INSPIRED by their favorite anime or game series, like what Silk Games did with NEStalgia. We all know that game was heavily inspired by Dragon Warrior, but it's not Dragon Warrior, it's NEStalgia.

What I'm trying to say is you can make fan-games without actually making fan-games. If you like Pokemon so much, then just make a monster raising game with your own monster concepts and gameplay ideas. That's essentially what Minecraft is. It was heavily inspired by Infiminer, but turned out to be something much more successful. We need more Notchs - people who take inspiration and build a BETTER mousetrap as opposed to an identical one. We wouldn't have half the great games we have today if people just sought to make exact clones of their favorite games. The reason we have fun games is because people take their favorite games and use that inspiration to improve upon that particular concept and give people a fresh experience.

I don't really care about what people make. I just don't understand what it feels like to have zero creativity and to have to rely on someone else's IP, back story, characters, and concepts in their entirety in order to develop a game, and then to be stupid enough to continue to make said games and attempt to profit from them even when other people around you are being handed C&Ds.

Perhaps you can enlighten me. Is it just pure laziness? Are some people just extremely bad at creating their own worlds and that's why they make fan-games? Why is it that people who can create games without ripping off someone elses idea entirely have always been the minority here? Or even in game development in general?

Even on Steam you see the same things over and over. Every game nowadays is either a zombie survival or a game about cubes. Then you know what'll happen? Someone with some actual damn creativity will come along and make something that blows everyone's mind and then the thousands of herp de derps who couldn't game design their way out of a paper bag are going to come make hundreds upon hundreds of god awful rip offs of that guys idea and make that the new indie game trend.

What I'm trying to say is, don't be that guy who can't game design their way out of a paper bag and makes god awful zombie survival and cube game rip offs. Strive to be that one rare guy who blows everyone's mind. That's who I always attempted to be back when I was developing games. Too bad I was designing games in a community that was more concerned with anime nonsense and anti-moderator drama. My efforts went largely unnoticed.

Lugia319 wrote:

Even if you create you create your own characters in generic fantasy setting, you're still using the generic fantasy setting with all of the tropes you'll use.

Of course, that's why we have genres. But there's a big difference in, for example, Minecraft and Terraria vs Minecraft and ...I don't know, just type "sandbox build" into Steam search and pick any one of the games that look like carbon copies of Minecraft.

Also, people really like their IP of choice. Who doesn't want to be a super saiyan beat up cell like the pansy he is? Who doesn't want to ride the frog with narto? So you make a game where you can be a super saiyan and beat up cell. You make a game where you can ride the frog with narto. It's a self-fulfillment that people provide themselves. And again, it's easier to just work from an existing mould than to make your own.

I'm just saying I don't understand why if a person likes super saiyans and jutsus, they can't just make a game with transformations and giant frogs without biting off the animes completely. I'll give you an example. My first strategy game on BYOND was "Empirez", and it was heavily inspired by one of my all time favorite games: Dynasty Warriors. Before making it, I had two options just like everyone else who makes games had: I either make it literally a Dynasty Warriors clone, or I take everything I like about Dynasty Warriors and use that as a foundation to build my own concepts on. I chose the latter option. What I ended up with was sort of like a 2D Hyrule Warriors. I was able to take inspiration from Dynasty Warriors but still create something that played and felt like its own entity. In fact, the few players that were helping me test never even mentioned that the game felt similar to Dynasty Warriors, which means I succeeded in being inspired by something but still making something that felt almost completely new.

I don't get why people think easy is bad.

I don't think easy is bad. My favorite game development engine is Construct 2 because it has drag and drop options. I love easy. What I don't love is short cuts that don't yield any benefits. I only take short cuts when I know there's absolutely 0 reason for me to do it the hard way. I use drag and drop because most of my game ideas nowadays are very casual and straightforward and writing them in C# or Java or whatever just doesn't make any sense. Now of course if I wanted to make the next WoW, I'd have to suck it up and learn programming because at that point it'd be stupid to assume I can drag and drop my way to a creating a game as large as WoW. When it comes to the actual game, I just see very little reason to take the easy route and infringe rather than making your own IP. Sure, it's easier, but that's literally the only benefit. In this situation, doing it the hard way works out far better and so taking the short cut anyway is silly at that point.

Of course it can be used to help people learn the basics but honestly is it helpful in any other way? I mean, a lot of the people here making fan-games ( I'm referring to people actually making fan-games, and not ripping and stealing sources ) already know the basics so in what other ways are they benefiting at that point to justify the "easy" way?

Lugia319 wrote:

The only benefit you need to make a fangame is self-fulfillment.

Ok, now I get it. For some people, self-fulfillment is making trendy knockoff games that aren't worth playing. For others, self-fulfillment is pushing themselves to be as creative as they can possibly be and making the next original indie hit.

Sometimes when you are ( or were ) passionate about something, it's hard to relate to people who treat it as "just a hobby". When I joined BYOND in 05, making games wasn't a hobby. I wasn't doing this simply because I had nothing better to do. I was doing this because it was something I was borderline obsessed with. I've also always held myself to a really high standard and I would refuse to release things I felt were "not good enough", which is why I only uploaded 2 games to the site and even those games I was sort of hesitant to show to other people because I hadn't "perfected" them yet.

Perhaps it's always easy to be nonchalant about things you don't care about. People on BYOND make crap games because they don't really take games seriously. But I did, and still do even though I don't make games anymore. I do the same thing to programmers. Whenever I see posts from people on BYOND about efficiency and programming habits, I just sit back and scratch my head because I think it's all irrelevant. My philosophy is that it doesn't matter how good your programming is - if you suck at making games, no one is going to play your games. Efficient programming just makes your game perform better in terms of lag or crashing, but it doesn't ensure that the game will be fun.

But at the end of the day, I think all of that because I don't like programming in general and I don't really care about it, but some of you guys do. To some of you, programming is not "boring" or just a hobby you do for giggles. You guys take it seriously and take pride in your programming, and some of you resort to talking down to others for having bad habits and not taking it as seriously as you do the same way I've been getting snappy at people over the years for not taking game design and making original concepts seriously ( because those were the things I felt were most important ).

Maybe we can just conclude that all of these things are important. Self-fulfillment, programming, art, design, they're all crucial. And we can also conclude that all of us get a bit anal when people appear to not give two shits about things we're passionate about.

EmpirezTeam wrote:

Lugia319 wrote:

The only benefit you need to make a fangame is self-fulfillment.

Ok, now I get it. For some people, self-fulfillment is making trendy knockoff games that aren't worth playing.

When I first started, I didn't even want to make a game. I didn't want to program. I just wanted to slowly level up in a world as similar to Dragonball Z as possible, and even now there's still not an official game for that. So I made a "fan-game".

But, while I was ripping and stealing IP, I fell in love with programming. I started to think up ideas just to try out programming concepts.

Thanks to my obsession with DBZ, and determination to experience that particular game-type, I found the only thing I'm actually any good at; programming.

Since then, I've got a Master's degree, worked for IBM, and now work in defence with cutting-edge tech.

So, in my eyes, starting with fan-games is okay. I'm glad I did.

Kozuma3 wrote:

EmpirezTeam wrote:

The thing I never understood about fan-game developers is why it's so difficult for them to... not make a fan-game. They act like they can't make a game INSPIRED by their favorite anime or game series, like what Silk Games did with NEStalgia. We all know that game was heavily inspired by Dragon Warrior, but it's not Dragon Warrior, it's NEStalgia.

The struggle for artwork is real, placeholders can only last so long. :(

Indie games never had a "professional artwork" requirement. That may be true for some commercial games to appease the CoD-obsessed generation, but indie games in general have accepted and even embraced retro, minimalist etc. styles of art.

I'm not sure why I said it.