Steal like a Game Designer
Once upon a time, a game designer copied a solution from another game, and his butt fell off.
Okay, now let’s talk about Hero Wars — I’m taking part in the production and development of that game as of writing this article.
If you feel that Hero Wars reminds you of some other game, it’s not just you, because initially the project was inspired by Heroes Charge.
So I want to talk to you about cloning and copying.
Let’s start with Clash of Clans.
It’s an awesome game, seven years old already, and still going strong — quite an age for a mobile game. Hundreds of millions of installs, billions of dollars of revenue, so a true king of mobile games. Kind of like World of Warcraft-sized for us, mobile game developers.
So it’s only natural that success like this draws the attention of people who want to copy it real quick and make a few bucks.
Not going to hide it, Nexters has its own inspired-by-Clash of Clans game, Throne Rush.
Or we can take another successful Clash of Clans-like game, Clash of Lords.
Actually, those games have quite a few differences from the “source material” — for example, Clash of Lords has a much stronger focus on heroes. But now I’d like to talk about the game that has much less differences from Clash of Clans, except maybe for having worse graphics. It’s Backyard Monsters.
So, looks worse but still pretty recognizable, right? Resource bars, little soldier pens, walls, towers… So a full-blown clone.
Also, it’s among the earliest ones: Clash of Clans was released on August 2nd, 2012, and Backyard Monsters was released in… January of 2010, on Facebook?
Okay, okay, I intentionally misled you. See, in truth Clash of Clans started as a pretty close clone of Backyard Monsters, which was a really successful Facebook game back then.
All right, but who would expect anything better of that mobile-casual market, you wouldn’t even call those real games! Let’s talk about Blizzard — not what it is right now, but the golden age of Starcraft…
Yeah, Blizzard had a lot of problems with Games Workshop. There was even a lawsuit (though unsuccessful). What’s even more ironic is that those Warhammer miniatures pictured above are of later generations, heavily inspired by StarCraft in turn. So, a real cycle of inspiration.
Okay, that’s starting to get awkward. You know what? Let’s talk about classical art instead.
Okay, I believe you get what I’m getting at. There is even a famous quote:
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso
What I find even more fun is that there are no credible sources that would prove Picasso ever said that.
All right, let’s say you have to make a new game or an in-game feature.
Say you are a game designer, and you’ve been tasked (or you decided yourself if that’s how processes in your particular company are) to make a new feature. For example, you’ve decided to rework an item shop in your game.
What would your approach be? From my experience (and I’m often like that, too) I’m going to assume that you’re going to sit down, think it all through, come up with a new awesome shop window, then the development team will create that awesome window, and you’ll release it to production…
Although in my experience there may be some options here. For example, there is a chance that you will quarrel with everyone for a month, start to hate each other, and drop the idea altogether.
Or during the production phase, you may realize that the idea is not so awesome after all, then spend three months reworking it, then release the unholy mess that you’ve created because come on, you’ve spent a lot of time on it, you can’t just throw it away.
The problem here is not that you are bad at coming up with ideas but that we usually have an overly simplified understanding of the development process: come up with something, start development, finish development:
In reality, development is a highly iterative process, and development can take a lot of cycles to finish:
And if you don’t want to spend cycle after cycle in development (or at least fewer cycles of “scrap it all and make properly”), those cycles should actually go to the “coming up with the idea” stage. That makes preproduction long and tedious but ensures better idea quality and saves development time.
But actually, to come up with a really good idea you either need a lot (and I mean a LOT) of iterations or to thoroughly research the problem in the first place: analyze data, run tests, prototype:
And you could speed up that phase, too! You would just need to look closely at solutions to the same problems in other games, to search for references. Because first, with some (not always high) probability, you can reasonably assume that if a successful game has some solution, it is at least not bad, and second, references from other games are, in essence, prototypes that somebody already created for you.
I couldn’t find an exact source, but I remember seeing at some point one of Blizzard’s game designers saying that while working on StarCraft, he had to play every single RTS of that time and disassemble it to pieces so that he couldn’t even look at RTS anymore.
And that’s the right way to do it!
If you would make an FPS, would you try to come up with a completely new shooting mechanic from scratch?
Or, if you make bicycles, would you try to reinvent the wheel?
If you’re a physicist, you wouldn’t try to reinvent the theory of gravity. Newton himself put it that way:
“ If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
And in game development we always try to make everything unique and unlike anyone else did it, and that’s not a bad thing per se, especially if you’re making games as art, but actually, to make it “unlike anyone else”, you need to know how anyone else did it very well.
In the best-case scenario, we usually look for our “giants” in the past, in the golden age of games like Baldur’s Gate, while looking at our “peers” with contempt or not looking at them at all.
You know, there is a misconception about copying. When you think about it you believe that the copy should be a result of your work:
In reality, it’s not like that. Well, you can do that, but that’s more or less pointless. Copying shouldn’t be the result; it should be the start point:
Now let’s speculate a bit about a different game and how they plausibly could come up with a game mechanic they got. I’m talking about AFK Arena and their Labyrinth mechanic:
But first, let’s talk about Heroes Charge, which popularized the battler genre.
Almost every battler game has some kind of mechanic like this:
- it’s cyclical — you progress in it for some limited time, then your progress resets, and you start anew
- it has battles
- heroes’ HP and energy transfer between battles, thus transforming the game, adding an element of choice and making the mechanic stand out among others
Heroes Charge version of that was Crusade. You would progress through a mission map, open chests between battles, next day the progress would reset, and you would start anew:
Interestingly enough, Idle Heroes (which probably is AFK Arena’s inspiration for their metagame) this mechanic took that mechanic almost as-is:
On the other hand, League of Angels: Fire Raiders (R.I.P.), which was popular at the same time as Heroes Charge had the Tower instead. The player would traverse the floors, find battles on some floors, chests on other, and altars on third. In altars, the player could choose (or rather buy with a limited in-mechanic resource) bonuses, which would affect their heroes in the Tower battles for that day.
In Hero Wars the Tower was taken as inspiration source: you traverse the floors,
Find altars on some floors,
and choose bonuses for your heroes. That is the most crucial innovation of LoA’s Tower. Choice is the central theme of the crusade mechanic: its main feature is that you need to choose which heroes to send in which battle, which heroes to save for later, which heroes to allow to save some energy for a chance of ult right at the start of a decisive battle, etc.
There are also chests on some floors, of course.
HW’s little innovation is that its chests also made you choose a reward — or rather which to receive for free and which to buy for hard currency:
So, back to the AFK Arena. Their Labyrinth is also a crusade-type mechanic. It may have been based on some of their own mechanics, because Lilith games, the creators of AFK Arena, are the guys who made DoT Arena, the game that Heroes Charge was copied from in the first place.
I believe they based their Labyrinth not on the initial Crusade, but on something like LoA’s Tower, they took an idea of a choice-based mechanic and turned it up to eleven.
For starters, if you look at the screenshot:
You can see that it is literally a labyrinth. It’s built of tiles which are actually road forks which the player needs to choose on every step. All the tiles in the row that the player didn’t choose are discarded. So in the screenshot, I can either decide to go fight in the mission or take a hero for rent.
Rented hero needs to be chosen from the draft, too:
After you’ve won a mission, you get to choose your reward. It’s kind of like altars in LoA Tower, but the bonuses are much more powerful.
So that is what the result of proper copying looks like, where copying is the starting point of the process, not the outcome.
If you are not a fan of free-to-play mobile games, you can find a lot of examples of what I’m talking about. I love Rimworld, which could be loosely described as “Dwarf Fortress with graphics and parts of Prison Architect”:
At the same time, you can still find people who post questions like, “In your opinion, is it better to write my own game engine from scratch or use an existing one?”. Yeah, Notch pulled it off with Minecraft, why won’t I? But let’s face it…
Now you probably feel attacked, but let’s face it again…
When Notch started to develop Minecraft, he said himself that he’s making an Infiniminer clone.
Don’t be afraid. Copy. Notch approves.
