Radical Fishing
The first game we ever made, Radical Fishing is our simulation of the noble pastime that is traditional redneck fishing. Armed with just his underwear, a boat and his trusty fishing gear, Billy uses the widely available range of destructive weaponry he brought to fish like a man.
These posts are related to Radical Fishing.
Clones: Advancing the Discussion
Some pretty busy weeks have passed lately, with the Super Crate Box iOS updates taking up most of the time that wasn’t invested in Ridiculous Fishing or GUN GODZ. One thing we’ve been working on behind the scenes was a talk about Game Cloning that we wanted to give over at the Game Developers Conference.
After being through quite an episode with Radical Fishing being cloned, we believe the industry is approaching the topic from the wrong angle – one that is focused on what we cannot do about the problem – and we want to offer an alternative and reignite the discussion from a more constructive perspective. It was just confirmed that we’re actually giving the talk and we’re thankful that we’ve been offered this chance to speak at the Independent Games Summit, an amazing venue to kickstart this new discussion.
In 2010, Vlambeer created Radical Fishing, released it as a sponsored Flash game and began work on an iOS version. As we were working, a third party suddenly released a game – which, down to the upgrades, was almost identical to Radical Fishing’s design. This resulted in a lot of thinking about defining cloning, the dangers it poses to upcoming indie developers and the variety of strong opinions that keep the issue from being debated in a useful manner.
Vlambeer will talk about the practical dangers of clones to our industry and what we CAN do, instead of discussing only what we cannot do. We want to pick up the discussion at its impasse and provide a starting point for a new, more practical conversation about cloning.
Further details and the exact timing of the talk will be announced over at the GDC Schedule Builder.
Unrelated: we’re hoping to push the Super Crate Box iOS update this week & will be attending the Nordic Gamejam in Copenhagen. It’s a busy week, but it’s going to be fun!
Super Crate Box iOS news!
It’s been way too long since we had any real news on Super Crate Box iOS, so we thought we’d pick it back up again at some really good news: We’ve just submitted the game to Apple for review! Admittedly, it didn’t make that original release date as the entire Radical Fishing cloning thing went down. On top of that it turned out the original Super Crate Box code is kind of a mess and the game is filled with little details that were hidden somewhere completely irrational deep inside the code. Halfbot has been doing an amazing job at finding and porting all that stuff for the past few months.
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Coming up!
We won a Dutch Game Award. It’s the biggest thing you can win in our home-country of the Netherlands and therefore it is quite a humbling thing to get such recognition from the industry around here. Radical Fishing took home the ‘Best Online Game’-award.
GUN GODZ is nearly done, so for all you Venus Patrol backers, we’ll have some news on when that’s available soon. For now, we thought we’d give you a short sneak-peek at it. Since the game is a polytheistic hip-hop inspired first person shooter, the best way to do that is release one of the songs the amazing KOZILEK made for us for you to listen to.
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Fantastic Arcade & Serious Sam release info
One episode that included Jan Willem running through Philadelphia airport with his shoes in his hands later, we arrived in Austin for Fantastic Arcade. At Fantastic Arcade, we’ve been finally showing off Serious Sam: The Random Encounter to a larger audience, which has been something we’ve been looking forward to for quite a while now. We’ve also talked about the game and the process behind creating the game on Friday, although in our slightly jetlagged state that did turn out rather interesting.
Something that’s also really cool is that Radical Fishing is playable on this amazing arcade cabinet courtesy of the event & we talked about the game a bit during our Developers’ Commentary panel on Saturday. It was fun finally getting to explain how much effort went into something as seemingly crude as Radical Fishing, getting all of it to feel & be just right. We continued to talk a bit about how cloning is different from iteration & how clones endanger creative, novel games – potentially stopping them from being made at all. Finally, we explained that in the wake of the cloning thing, people told us that we should make ‘less simple games’ to avoid cloning and not ‘show our ideas’. We proceeded to show two simple prototypes we have that we might work on some more later on called FFFLOOD & Yeti Hunter because you know, screw ‘em.
The most fun thing about Fantastic Fest is meeting up with fans and fellow developers, but the Super Crate Box Versus tournament we kicked off with an opening match of titans between JW and me comes in at a pretty good second place. I’ll have to admit that JW won in a stroke of luck (I did manage to beat JW in the Bit Pilot tournament on Saturday so that evens things out – although JW would say it doesn’t). Brandon Strong took away the first place in the Super Crate Box tournament and earned himself eternal fame and a crate filled with goodies.
Speaking of Super Crate Box, Halfbot and us have decided that Super Crate Box iOS just needs a bit more time. It’s definitely getting there – the controls are tight, the gameplay is solid & we can pretty consistently have players score close to their desktop scores. We’re just going to tweak the weapons a bit more so they feel right on iOS. We believe that’ll upgrade the game from being a direct port of the PC/Mac version to being a real Super Crate Box iOS. We’re really sorry for the delay there for all of those waiting for the game, but trust us when we say we think it’ll be worth the wait.
So now to the most important part of this post, because those of you looking forward to shooting hordes of enemies in their turnbased face, you won’t have to wait for long. Serious Sam: The Random Encounter will release on Steam and other digital distribution platforms for $4.99 in mid-October. That’s right, only a few more weeks left!
Encouragement
Just wanted to take a moment to say a quick thing about the Ninja Fishing thing.
In case you’ve missed it, Ninja Fishing launched and is getting some extremely good numbers. We don’t want to complain about that. Greg said it all and he said it way better than we could ever do. We don’t want to discuss cloning and patents, because we think the only thing that matters is that we feel that what Gamenauts did is morally wrong. The worst thing is reading positive reviews complimenting the superoriginal design of the fishing gameplay – by people who have no clue that we even exist.
What we want to do is thank everyone for speaking up without us having to ask for it. While that one tweet, Google+ post, Facebook update, blog post, app review or telling your friends won’t stop or solve the entire cloning thing, it does tell us that all of you have our backs might we ever need it. Nothing encourages us to work even harder than knowing there’s people out there that care about Vlambeer.
Thank you for supporting what we do, so that we can continue what we’re doing.
Rami on januari 24, 2012 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman