Ridiculous Fishing

Recently there’s been a lot of discussion in indie game dev circles around the subject of cloning– that is, copying a game and releasing it as your own. It’s an issue that bubbled to the surface with the saga of Ninja Fishing, an iOS clone of Vlambeer’s earlier Flash game Radical Fishing, which has beaten their own iOS remake to market. An awful lot has been said about this, some have come out with strong condemnation, while others have been more moderate. This is a terrible situation for Vlambeer, and I feel for them. But it’s a difficult issue for me.. because my most popular game is a clone.

I’ve never tried to deny it, and I’ve been upfront about the influences of the game when it’s come up. But it’s not something I’ve talked about publicly, either, so maybe it’s time to do that.

FastCrawl

FastCrawl is an indie downloadable title released in 2006, by creator Glen Pawley. It is a light dungeon crawl, based around completing an adventure in a single session. By mid-2007, around the time I first played it, it had been essentially abandoned by the developers, with no further work planned (even the domain has lapsed, now).

To be honest, though, I don’t know that this impacted my decision-making process very much. As soon as I played it, I just wanted to create my own take on it. In fact I couldn’t stand to play it more than a couple of times, because when playing it all I could see was what I would do differently. At that time, my brother was having some early success with Flash games. I decided I would have a stab at it too, and that my FastCrawl-clone would be the testbed. Over three months I learnt Flash and built the game, and Monsters’ Den was born.

It’s not exactly the same. The focus is different, on longer adventures and more customization and character progression. Each character has multiple abilities. All of the items and monsters are my own (with apologies to Blizzard, D&D, Tolkien etc). I didn’t feel bad about mimicking the combat system, as it was already derived from Disciples (which I may have stolen from anyway). And yet, looking at the screenshots for this game for the first time since 2007.. I feel a bit ashamed. I never intended to do anything wrong, but did I anyway? Am I no better than Gamenauts? Well.. I don’t know.

I’ve never spoken to Glen Pawley. I don’t know what he’s doing now, or the circumstances around the demise of FastCrawl. I do hope my game wasn’t a nail in the coffin. We are all building on prior art.. but some games more than others.

Thank you, Glen. It was a good idea.