Cloning games is fraught with legal difficulty because the courts appear to consider video games as audiovisual media for copyright purposes and not strictly computer programs. This means that if you develop any game which is "substantially similar" to another game, even on a surface level, you may be found liable for copyright infringement. K.C. Munchkin shared neither code nor assets with Pac-Man, for instance, but because it centered around a "gobbler" that ate dots and avoided monsters, it was considered similar enough to Pac-Man to infringe on the latter's copyright.
Whatever you do, never ever clone Tetris. Henk Rogers has lawyered up like no other game developer has, and asserts copyright on all falling-tetromino games, as well as trademark rights on various generic elements of said games, including the shapes of the tetrominoes themselves and the public-domain song "Korobeiniki" when used in video games. If you clone Tetris without authorization from Tetris Holdings, you are at grave risk of being sued; if you are sued, you will lose.
Is that even possible? The shapes are simply all the geometric shapes that can be formed by a specific rule. It's not a work of art, they are derived mathematically. Anyone who comes up with the same rule will find the same set of shapes. It wasn't even an invention of Pajitnov; tetrominoes had already been used in tabletop puzzle games.
Trademarks apply within certain markets. Namco, for instance, is the name of both a video game company and a company that makes swimming pools. Because their markets don't overlap, each can own the Namco trademark for their respective markets. Famously, the name Apple was similarly contended over by a computer company and a record company owned by the Beatles, with the settlement stipulating that the computer company not get into the music business (which settlement was broken when the computer company could afford Boies-tier lawyers).
It is certainly possible to do what The Tetris Company has done, which is to trademark the tetromino shapes as applied to the video game market, while still leaving them generic for use in mathematical puzzles, physical tabletop games, etc.
It's too bad that so many OS games get abandoned. It seems like the most successful projects aren't full "games" per se -- they're more like engines, like ScummVM or one of the many Doom engine remakes.
I guess it keeps the scope a little smaller to only do the engine, without worrying about the artwork, music, etc.
Fascinating, isn't it? There is something about storytelling in games that thrives on having a small group with creative control and seems to require a huge amount of effort.
But it is weird that we don't see better open source games, because good storytellers have no problems giving their work away for free. There is an overabundance of great writing on the internet. But taking a solid plot and turning it into a game engine just doesn't take.
I'll point at Return of the Obra Dinn as a nice example I played through recently. Very simple story (ship suffered a terrible fate), very simple mechanic (figure out who all the passengers were from visual clues). Individually all the ideas are so trivial it barely makes sense to talk about charging for them, and the engine isn't so amazing. But I've simply never seen an OSS game with that level of quality and storytelling. Which is actually highly weird given that I've seen both better quality storytelling and engines of similar or higher complexity made available as open source/free as a labour of love. There is something much more interesting than meets the eye going on in game development to do with the intersection of GUI complexity/difficulty of asset creation/stories.
I often find storytelling in games to be a time-wasting distraction. For example, Slay the Spire would be significantly improved if the narrative elements were removed and I could just focus on the duels. I play games to play. If I want a story, I’ll watch TV or a movie.
> But it is weird that we don't see better open source games, because good storytellers have no problems giving their work away for free. There is an overabundance of great writing on the internet. But taking a solid plot and turning it into a game engine just doesn't take.
Mh, I'm not a professional gamedev or such, but from 1-2 personal projects, some ludum dare interactions and also looking at the OpenRA project: Content is grind, and it's both easy to underestimate how much content is in games, and how much of a grind that content creation can be.
Like, if we stick with the Red Alert / Dune2+ universe. Initially after some design phase, you need to implement your mechanics, set the basics for your systems, implement the architecture how systems interact. This is very much what folk would call "interesting software development".
However, once you have that: You need to implement 30 units, paint them, add the units to your engine, create their behavior. There is some creativity involved here, but these are 30 very similar paint-by-number tasks. And then there are 2-3 * 20 maps to design, playtest and balance. Or 100 pushover levels to make, or 100 lost vikings levels. For example, the last time I was looking at it, OpenRA was still looking for mappers to setup some of the last maps from the different games - and not all of those levels were engine blocked.
Even look at the Return of the Obra Dinn. Look at the number of scenes you explore, the number of people you need to figure out. Even very optimistic estimations quickly run into weeks and months of similar kinded work.
I would suspect being in a group of a few people all excited about this project and/or needing the money it should make would make handling this easier.
There's the matter of scope but there's the matter of motivation too.
When an opensource application like GIMP, Blender, or even Manuksript for a lesser known example, are started, it's mainly because proponents of opensource want to use such application but dislike closed source. They fill a need, so getting new people willing to participate even after the people who started the project moved to something else is possible.
For an opensource game, whether a clone or not, the project is generally started because some proponents of opensource like the original game and want to share it with the community. But they are not really needed per se. That means it's more difficult to get new people joining the project, and consequently if the original team cannot keep getting motivated for many months/years, the project end up abandoned.
> When an opensource application like GIMP, Blender, or even Manuksript for a lesser known example, are started, it's mainly because proponents of opensource want to use such application but dislike closed source.
Just for the record, Gimp was started as a student assignment project [1], and Blender started as proprietary software [2].
I wasn't really around at the time but I think around 10-15 years ago there was a lot more optimism around open source games since that's where a lot of these [abandoned] projects come from. The dream of an open-source utopia probably died out for a few reasons but one fact is that many of those open source games were shit. Imagine being a kid whose friends all have a DS and mario kart but your dad is a big FOSS advocate and only lets you play SuperTuxKart..
Another reason is direction. The idea of having many random people contribute whatever they come up with works well for a lot of boring "practical" software but probably not very well for games, except things like Nethack and CDDA where having everything including the kitchen sink is one of the main points
also the project astraying by the freedom of OSS, like Space Station 13 [0]... may some like the possibility of doing your own fork, tho, centralizing effort (even if more conflicting and laborious) into a single app may is a sensible path towards great (F)OSS.
Also the most successful
ones like OpenTTD are delivering a complete out of the box experience. Don’t need original files, don’t need to search for old CDs or
pirating. Just
download and play
Readit News
Open Source Game Clones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20110442 - June 2019 (96 comments)
Open Source Game Clones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468487 - Oct 2017 (78 comments)
Open Source Game Clones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184463 - Aug 2014 (28 comments)
Open Source Game Clones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775714 - May 2013 (81 comments)
Whatever you do, never ever clone Tetris. Henk Rogers has lawyered up like no other game developer has, and asserts copyright on all falling-tetromino games, as well as trademark rights on various generic elements of said games, including the shapes of the tetrominoes themselves and the public-domain song "Korobeiniki" when used in video games. If you clone Tetris without authorization from Tetris Holdings, you are at grave risk of being sued; if you are sued, you will lose.
Is that even possible? The shapes are simply all the geometric shapes that can be formed by a specific rule. It's not a work of art, they are derived mathematically. Anyone who comes up with the same rule will find the same set of shapes. It wasn't even an invention of Pajitnov; tetrominoes had already been used in tabletop puzzle games.
Trademarks apply within certain markets. Namco, for instance, is the name of both a video game company and a company that makes swimming pools. Because their markets don't overlap, each can own the Namco trademark for their respective markets. Famously, the name Apple was similarly contended over by a computer company and a record company owned by the Beatles, with the settlement stipulating that the computer company not get into the music business (which settlement was broken when the computer company could afford Boies-tier lawyers).
It is certainly possible to do what The Tetris Company has done, which is to trademark the tetromino shapes as applied to the video game market, while still leaving them generic for use in mathematical puzzles, physical tabletop games, etc.
I guess it keeps the scope a little smaller to only do the engine, without worrying about the artwork, music, etc.
But it is weird that we don't see better open source games, because good storytellers have no problems giving their work away for free. There is an overabundance of great writing on the internet. But taking a solid plot and turning it into a game engine just doesn't take.
I'll point at Return of the Obra Dinn as a nice example I played through recently. Very simple story (ship suffered a terrible fate), very simple mechanic (figure out who all the passengers were from visual clues). Individually all the ideas are so trivial it barely makes sense to talk about charging for them, and the engine isn't so amazing. But I've simply never seen an OSS game with that level of quality and storytelling. Which is actually highly weird given that I've seen both better quality storytelling and engines of similar or higher complexity made available as open source/free as a labour of love. There is something much more interesting than meets the eye going on in game development to do with the intersection of GUI complexity/difficulty of asset creation/stories.
Mh, I'm not a professional gamedev or such, but from 1-2 personal projects, some ludum dare interactions and also looking at the OpenRA project: Content is grind, and it's both easy to underestimate how much content is in games, and how much of a grind that content creation can be.
Like, if we stick with the Red Alert / Dune2+ universe. Initially after some design phase, you need to implement your mechanics, set the basics for your systems, implement the architecture how systems interact. This is very much what folk would call "interesting software development".
However, once you have that: You need to implement 30 units, paint them, add the units to your engine, create their behavior. There is some creativity involved here, but these are 30 very similar paint-by-number tasks. And then there are 2-3 * 20 maps to design, playtest and balance. Or 100 pushover levels to make, or 100 lost vikings levels. For example, the last time I was looking at it, OpenRA was still looking for mappers to setup some of the last maps from the different games - and not all of those levels were engine blocked.
Even look at the Return of the Obra Dinn. Look at the number of scenes you explore, the number of people you need to figure out. Even very optimistic estimations quickly run into weeks and months of similar kinded work.
I would suspect being in a group of a few people all excited about this project and/or needing the money it should make would make handling this easier.
When an opensource application like GIMP, Blender, or even Manuksript for a lesser known example, are started, it's mainly because proponents of opensource want to use such application but dislike closed source. They fill a need, so getting new people willing to participate even after the people who started the project moved to something else is possible.
For an opensource game, whether a clone or not, the project is generally started because some proponents of opensource like the original game and want to share it with the community. But they are not really needed per se. That means it's more difficult to get new people joining the project, and consequently if the original team cannot keep getting motivated for many months/years, the project end up abandoned.
Just for the record, Gimp was started as a student assignment project [1], and Blender started as proprietary software [2].
[1] https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html
[2] https://www.blender.org/about/history/
Another reason is direction. The idea of having many random people contribute whatever they come up with works well for a lot of boring "practical" software but probably not very well for games, except things like Nethack and CDDA where having everything including the kitchen sink is one of the main points
i never played the mentioned game
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5sjwqUten0
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