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UPDATE: https://medium.com/murat-pak/a820c916a9a9
~Hello TIG!
Today is not my best day ever. I am going to write the story of a huge theft that is happening right now. But first things first, let me introduce myself.
I am Murat Pak, a multi-disciplinary designer with many awards including two times finalist of Vimeo awards. Please feel free to google me (
https://www.google.com/search?q=Murat+Pak). I can categorise myself as an established designer known and respected in most of the existing Motion Design communities worldwide.
I do freelance with the name Undream. Feel free have a look at what I do and who I worked with so far (
http://undream.net). Most of the stuff you see on the website are single person projects.
Those being said, I've started having huge interest on Game Design for the last few years and
worked on a game called "Monomons" for around one and a half year under the name of "Buggum". We've made an agreement with Chillingo to release it, everything was going decent.
I had the role to create all of the designs, art direction, direction, technical direction (including algorithms); however besides all those I found myself coding shaders and connecting nodes since my team mates were the
wrong choice for me. Slow, without passion and self-responsibility.. I felt like I had to carry two more people in the hard path to success; asking myself why I was doing this to myself every single day. In the end, I had a burnout and lost my trust to them. Had to split up Buggum.
Here is a picdump includes various screengrabs from the game and from the design process before we split up: http://imgur.com/a/OflgJ. The main reason I am posting this is to support what I am going to say next:
As a result, we had to make a deal about "Monomons", since the game was pretty unique. I told them I could find better developers to start over the programming; therefore they took their code and left everything that belonged to me, to me. And I started over to the whole game.
However; that's not what really happened. They continued working on the existing copy of the repository, made an agreement with a designer, modified the visuals a little bit (barely enough to avoid legal issues); viola! They have a new(!) game.I warned them face to face about the ethics and legal issues. They don't really seem to understand or care.. I honestly don't think they had the
guts and creativity start over to a barely new game instead of
stealing my work. But this, this is too much.
Now, you can see these people as MildMania studio with their new game "Darklings", stealing what I created and using that against me (http://www.mildmania.com/darklings). They even have a page about "how it all started" in their dishonest blog (
http://www.mildmania.com/blog/2013/9/9/how-it-all-started ) -
trying to prove their lies to everyone else. Why would anyone need to explain "how it started"? Please have a look at everything and judge this situation yourself.
Compare the imgur picture dump I posted to the existing game they seem to "create" (http://imgur.com/a/OflgJ).The reason I'm writing all of this to TIG is because I think this is completely unfair. I know that the indie gaming communities are not forgiving to the people who steal.
I also don't know their potential or if they have agreed with any publishers. This is exactly why I don't want to over-talk about this. I have a decent reach in design communities but cautious to talk about all of this all over the place since I also don't want to advertise my thieves' game.
I did all I could do to reach most of the publishers I could reach to notify them about a possible "copycat" (more than a copycat at this case) of what I'm creating at Undream, but that's obviously all I can do at this point.
I think most of the indie game blogs should be reading TIG; and crossing fingers to make them see this post before it's too late.
If everything's too late, I'll make what I have opensource for anyone to release/modify/use freely.Waiting for your opinions,
Update: You can read more about the story here
http://indiestatik.com/2013/09/16/monomons-is-a-game-at-the-heart-of-an-indie-studio-divorce-gone-wrong/