Who copied who?

I've got mixed feeling about this.

Signs of life has many "conceptual similarities" (Not the genre similarities) with Starbound. Especially i don't like look of the ship in the end of the video - It's really similar with one of the Starbound ship screenshots (Might be coincidence or something, we don't know). And i don't like health/battery (If it's even battery) HUD, they are similar in some way too.

But... Eh, who'm i to judge ? If it rip off then not the obvious one, if it's not - Guy might be as good as Chucklefish crew or even better. Game looks good though. We can't be sure, Chucklefish could rip off this game. Who knows ?

 

someone did copy the name of the site , both begins with "play" --"

 

Eh, Ill stick with Starbound, the character you play as looks rather generic and moves a little awkwardly :/

 

Copy is such an ugly word and doesn't really take in to account how the world actually works. We could all claim Starbound copied Terraria and that Terraria copied Minecraft, and in a sense that would be right. However, without that sort of iteration we'd still be in the era of the Model A and the biplane. Innovation is born in variation, of applying old ideas in new ways, not from a vacuum of spontaneous generation. That isn't "copying" anything because you don't end up with a perfect clone of the orignal, you end up with something different and (hopefully) better. No, I'd argue plagiarism is what happens when you don't add anything of your own to the formula.

 

It looks different enough to me. I really don't like the art style it has though. I don't think it compares with Starbound at all to be honest. Then again I've played neither.

 

After seeing the trailer, I'd play this game.

I don't LOVE the art style, but it's not bad (and it's certainly not ugly). They should make the blocks match the rest of the art style, though. Maybe round them out a bit and give blocks like dirt jagged edges instead of straight lines.

 

It's a really good game, i think it's really good and should progress to it's best!

 

Looks more like Edge of Space than Starbound. And, TBH, it looks pretty bad.

I much more enjoy the cartoony pixel games than the games where people attempt realistic pixels.

But I also enjoy watching anime, so it might just be my own personality.

 

copy or not, it looks like another poor man's Starbound so I don't really care.

Whoever copies who, whatever, as long as one of them is the better game I'll buy it. So far starbound looks like the best starbound imo

 

Another thing. This kind of thing encourages competition and innovation.
So someone copies Starbound. They see an idea they like in Starbound, maybe they think they can do better, say for instance the music system - so they try, and come up with a different system than Starbound's. Bam, you've got a unique thing! Then the two can be compared with one another. Maybe one is better in some ways, and the other in others. Then someone says "Well, if I take X and Y from Starbound's music system and Z from Starboundlike's music system and combine them...". Bam, you've got another new thing, which is maybe the best of both worlds.

Competition is good. It makes people want to do better. I don't doubt most of us would agree that better is.. well.. better. Could have phrased that better.

 

The problem with game like that imo, is that it looks silly when you have tall characters in 2D game, and try to look realistic, because it just ends up looking silly and very unnatural. Terraria and Starbound look more pixilly and it works perfectly for 2D game, when game go for realistic look, they either have to be done just right, or I can't stand them, which exactly what is going on in Signs of Life game, it just doesn't look right to me and that's why I am not interested in it.

 

One day, just one day, I hope people just play games for enjoyment, pleasure, and relaxation.. Maybe even competitively, in a tournament. I don't know when it started, but this whole "My game is better than yours", "Quit copying ideas", "My console is better than yours", has gone on to the point that it is just dull. Whatever happened to playing games because they are fun? When did it devolve to people comparing pixels and claiming "They are copying because it looks similar!" or "MINECRAFT CLONE!"

Does it matter if it was based on Starbound? If you are so proud of Starbound and claim it is the superior game, then you have nothing to worry about from a "No-name company", right? Are people really so insecure over a video game?

The video game industry is in itself is a locked down area, and I consider it a broken concept. Madden is a perfect example of what's wrong with the video game industry. Nobody wants to play football games without their teams, and EA has a monopoly on that. Namco-Bandai literally owns a copyright on mini-games you can play on your loading screen. How dumb is that?

The more you lock down the market, the more closed source it becomes. That's what makes indie-games so appealing. A lot of people are inspired by other games to make their games. There's an obvious sign that a game is a simple copy, and then there's an obvious sign when a game takes inspiration from another. For instance, Shadowrun Returns is inspired by old school top down RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Night, etc. Are they copying them because they use a similar dialogue system?

Does every game have to be so different? Maybe one day people will just set down and play Halo with their Call of Duty brethren, rather than claiming one game is superior over the other. Maybe one day Assassin Creed fans will relax on a couch to play a good game of Mario Party with their friends.

Why is the video game industry the only industry that behaves this way? The movie industry is nothing like this. It's no surprise, then, that people want games to be considered "Art", because gamers are definitely a piece of work.

 

Rarity, you are (somewhat) answereing your own question (assuming it wasent rhetorical).
For the same reason the video game industry is the way it is right now, people have followed the trend and try to "defend" what they like from impostors. What with the whole DRM, copyright and all that shit, people get brainwashed into believing they MUST root ONLY for what they want to see live-on and nothing else, else it starts "copying" and "debasing" the "original" source. Yes, thats a lot of comma, but thats because there's a lot of underlying (and stupid) meanings.

There's no reason for that trend to not transfer to indie either, people want to "protect" the legitimacy/legacy/supremacy of what they like, hence why games like edge of space and signs of life are causing such a hissy fit on these forums.

This thread itself is basicly a direct copy-paste of what we saw before with edge of space. I swear its the same whole thing happening all over again.

 

IMO these types of games, sandbox platformers, have become really popular along with the rise of indie gaming. I think a lot of people have been wanting to make a "terraria in space" or "minecraft in space", what have you, for a while. And now is the perfect time for an indie developer to go out and try. So what I'm trying to say is it's a very popular idea during a good time for indie developers so it just happened.

The similarties between starbound and terraria are extremely noticeable but starbound didn't copy terraria. It used it's style of game as a "platform" to create their own game. I think all of the developers of the above mentioned games just used a simple popular "platform" to create a game based on a very popular idea within the gaming community. Maybe one dev team really did just try to cash in by releasing a starbound esque game before chucklefish got starbound out, it's a possibility lord knows people do that with games and movies all the time. Who knows, who cares?

Honestly both Edge of Space and Sings of Life don't look very good to me, but I'm a pretty picky gamer so to each his own.

 

Minecraft was inspired by infiniminer, Terraria was most likely inspired by Minecraft, Starbound was influenced by Terraria for sure, even though it started as something completely different and all of those games have and will influence and inspire more games.

It's not a bad thing unless it's an outright rip-off.
For example I doubt that we would have ever gotten Sonic games if Mario didn't exist.
Nintendo using Mario as a mascot was probably what inspired Sega to create a mascot as well.

Back them most games had completely forgettable characters.

 

I can imagine minecraft children reacting like 'omg starbound is a copy of terraria and egdge of space should make an origionallall game liek minecraf this wnt be successful!'

 

I would like to point out here that just because it doesn't hit the news, producers do sue each other a hell of a lot over remakes, and copyrighted material all the time. Specially when someone does a movie that has a similar plot but is slightly different even with a totally different ending. But nobody gives to shits because Hollywood has so much money the rest of the US would go bankrupt before the big wood did.

Some producers know they will make money whether the movie is shit or not and can grease the pockets of the ones who made it first. Usually this is already arranged through several legal agreements that are already hammered out between lawyers and signed by those who have the legal copyright or those authorized to sign in their stead as a representative.

However one part i will have to absolutely disagree on, is that if anything, the video game industry is becoming more and more like the hollywood industry, and the hollywood industry, is about to take a back seat. Fewer and fewer movies are pulling in the gross income every year at box office, and games are becomming more and more frequent to the point where they are starting to outnumber movies in annual public release.

Example. This year lets say there was ten movies that hit the theatre that were worth watching.

Lets say there were 14 games that hit the shelves that a load of people bought.

And last year or the year before those tables being flipped.

(I blame boring reality shows, america's next top model.. and those paparazzi shows about a bunch of stars who have it so hard that they have to set themselves on fire, snort a line of cocaine and wreck their lamborghinis because it sucks being wealthy and famous.)



Soon, legal disputes about artwork, code, and such may end up sitting in front of corporate judges... But right now the code itself is the only trump card, that and the never ending battle against illegitimate copies of these works of art hogging more resources than a lawsuit is really worth.

Just about all i can share on my view of it.

 

1 difference tough, Minecraft is an ENTIRELY different game when you compare it to inifminer. Terraria is very simialar to minecraft, and starbound is very simialar to terraria.

 

"If i were too see further I would be standing on the shoulders of giants"- Sorry i don't know the exact wording infact I don't even know who said this

 

You could argue that Terraria is very similar to a lot of 16-bit era sidescrolling platformers too, the main difference being the player's ability to manipulate the terrain ad infinitum. The size and stance of player sprites, and the way almost all swords are swung in a vertical arc overhead could be argued to have come from the battle animations of the Final Fantasy series, prior to Final Fantasy VI.

Whether they're closely related and thus very similar in gameplay (Terraria to Starbound) or more distantly related (Infiniminer to Minecraft) is irrelevant. The point still stands that none of these games came about entirely by their lonesome. Even the very first video game to ever be produced, way back in 1947, is based on the radar screen displays of missile defense systems back in World War II.

Inspiration comes from everywhere. Nothing ever stands wholly on its own. In the end, what people will purchase or not will determine what is successful or not. The 'difference' you see exists, but is a moot point.

Oh, and SlyNinjaRabbit, that quote you're looking for is this:

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