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[Ninja Dodo]

In their announcement it says they've been working on their project since the release of their other game, which according to their site was released in April 2011. At that time there was no public record of me working on Hellas, so if that is when they started their project they could not have known about mine.

That does not take away from the fact that this is very discouraging, because now I am probably going to be accused of stealing their idea if/when I make a more public announcement about my game, or try to enter IGF or something.

In short: this sucks.

HOWEVER, it's likely that beyond the graphical similarity and 2D platforming our games go in very different directions.

Mentions of RPG and "2D sci-fi sidescoller game" and "elemental disasters" suggest a different game, though "multiplayer battles with tactical bronze-age combat" and "taking control of the elements as your own" does sound similar to what I am doing.

[davidp]

That is interesting. I'm curious, by are you saying you think I am copying them, or are you saying you think they are copying me?

well your thread is from sept 2011, they announced their game (judging by their twitter) in february 2012, so...

anyway both games looks awfully similar when it comes to graphics and it sucks a bit imo. anyway, keep up the good work!

[PompiPompi]

Hmm, just wondring, I don't want to discourage you but... is there a practical reason to keep updating this devlog?
I mean, to be honest devlogs seem to be more like for fun and maybe find good play testers.
It's kind of paranoid, but if you are going to update this devlog, every good idea you have will be visible to the public...

[JMickle]

too paranoid.

[PompiPompi]

I dunno, it could happen though...
What prevents from someone to take a look at one of the devlogs and copy the ideas\game? I mean, some games are not extremly original(like mine), but other original games are basing their success on their originality.
Like they say, just because you are paranoid it doesn't mean they arn't after you. XD

I mean, people do crappy things when money and business comes into play, it's not out of the question.
To be honest, if I was already an established indie game developer, and I had my selected dedicated testers, then I wouldn't reveal that much about my game(if it was very original), unless I wanted to do it for the fun of it. There is no much point doing open development from the business side.
Open development isn't always better.

[JMickle]

games dont get successful purely because of originality; the work in coming up with an original idea is ridiculously minute compared to the work involved in every other stage of development.

[PompiPompi]

games dont get successful purely because of originality; the work in coming up with an original idea is ridiculously minute compared to the work involved in every other stage of development.

Sure, but.. you are aware that games get cloned... Minecraft(that game it's based on)... and many others.
Now imagine that some big company would have seen Notch game before it got extremly famous, and just made the same game but with better graphics and execution.
If that would have happened, most of us wouldn't know who Notch is today.
Sure, ideas take very little time to think of and developing the idea also don't take that much time, execution takes the most time.
But that doesn't mean that ideas are not valuable.
Is the idea behind minecraft not valuable? Is it only execution? Did Notch make the most money because he have the best Minecraftian execution?
Also, even if the idea is not important, your are building a game around it. You can think of a new idea immediately, but can you change your game to the new idea immediately? No, you already invested in the idea, so the value of the idea is not only it's creation but what you have invested in it.

It can be useful to share your idea and development to get feedback and gather new fans, but if you don't need those two things, it might be more useful to keep your idea for yourself(and your dedicated testers).

[rek]

It doesn't matter who started/announced first, it's just a bummer that they are conceptually and artistically quite similar.

[PompiPompi]

Well, we may never know, but I am just saying it's not out of the question that one cloned the other, but meh... (and I tend to believe ninja was cloned, but I am just paranoid XD)

[McGibs]

Hey guys, I thought I'd pop over here and offer AlienTrap's perspective.

My name is Jesse McGibney, and I'm the artist behind Apotheon. We were unaware of Hellas development until about a month ago when I stumbled across it while google searching reference images. At this point, we were already several months into development and the art style had already been established. This situation is simply an unfortunate coincidence of two developers choosing the same artistic inspiration.

My thought process for choosing this style went something like this:
Our previous game, Capsized, was a 2D platformer with an extremely busy and dense visual style. This led to some gameplay issues as some players found it hard to tell things apart, and also from an engineering standpoint as the maps and animations were very time consuming and non-efficient to develop.
For our next project, I wanted to do a 180 on the art style, and have something very readable and simplified. The level assets had to be tileable, and the characters had to be simple enough to easily animate and have modular parts. We were aiming for an epic, open world single player experience, and we settled on Greek mythology for the wealth of existing material and presence in modern culture (everyone knows a little bit about greek mythology).
Greek pottery art seemed like a no-brainer, as it has a very flat 2D style, perfect for a sidescroller, easily tiled patterns, and is something that games haven't used much. Rock of Ages was the first game-source I went to for inspiration, and the only one I could find that used this style.

I've played Hellas, and I will say that aside from the subject matter, art style, and genre (which, honestly, all three go hand in hand. no one is going to make a top-down greek vase game featuring giant space robots), our two games have very different directions, both in narrative and gameplay. I think Hellas is a great project, and I hope Ninja Dodo will continue to make something original and unique.

In the end, we both looked at this and said "yeah... if those guys started moving, that would make a pretty cool game..."

[Ninja Dodo]

Thanks for responding. Glad to hear you guys are going in a different direction with the gameplay. I think you're right the combination of concepts is somewhat obvious given the subject matter and I'm actually kind of surprised there haven't been other sidescrollers in this art-style.

[eigenbom]

Just saw Apotheon on indie games and was going to post here, but I see that everyone already has. This really sucks...

[r0ber7]

Just saw Apotheon on indie games and was going to post here, but I see that everyone already has. This really sucks...

+1

I still like this one better, with the vase and all.

[Nate_G]

I've just seen it on RPS too.. I've leapt to your defense though ND

[Ninja Dodo]

Appreciated.

@r0ber7: Yeah, I'm sticking more directly to the medium of vases with the colours and texture (no blues or greens) so the look differs there. And thanks.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Just wanted to say that I've really liked following your game and think you have such a unique take on this whole game that even though there's another game out there which has some similar visuals, I'm still closely following everything you do with this. Have loved the visuals from the start and your whole vase and gods concept 

[Ninja Dodo]

Thanks.

[Pedro Macedo Camacho]

Well this is a really big coincidence!

[heck]

This reminds me of Explodemon & 'Splosion Man: http://www.onebitbeyond.com/?p=229
With thousands of developers out there, perhaps it's only natural that these coincidences happen. Like the saying: There is nothing original under the sun.

[Ninja Dodo]

Apart from being on consoles that is a familiar sounding scenario. :/

Anyway, I can sit and be disappointed that some parts of my idea are no longer completly unique, or I can continue making the game I want to make.

So...

Here's a video of some new stuff I've been working on: