PuzzleJuice and the cloning of art styles... (HueBrix and Frankenword)

edited in Questions and Answers
Man, it seems like Aeiowu can't get a break. First there's the whole Ridiculous Fishing/Ninja Fishing cloning debacle and now a couple of iOS games have pretty much ripped the amazingly solid style he came up with for PuzzleJuice.

Disclaimer, PuzzleJuice is a favorite game of mine and I followed the dev emails between him and Asher really closely, watching the game evolve. It's a fascinating read.

Anyway, so Aeiowu's now written something about the whole thing and he's a lot more magnanamous this time around. Personally, I think that HueBrix and Frankenword are both rather derivative games and thus couldn't really be bothered with them. I mean, I've played loads of variations of both of those - I even wrote my own "frankenword" generator years ago for fun after friends and I spent school lunch coming up with our own odd combos. It's sad that they replicated PuzzleJuice's considered style, but I can see how they messed things up and, like Aeiowu, I'd encourage their developers to look deeper next time (in both game and art design) because I feel there's a lot of improvement that could happen in both spaces...

Why Frankenword insists on defining words for you blows my mind. It could have been such a cool little twitter word of mouth thing to have people tweet their own definitions.

Comments

  • Just got puzzle juice, I'm guessing it's also taking the concept of juice from that other presentation? Anyhoo it has juice and it's really well put together for such a massive scope of stuff to ask the player to do. But it manages it so well.

    The two style clones were really shades of puzzlejuice.

    However there's been other games in this style - not the exact pallette, but stuff like SpellTower I feel is pretty much also in the same style.

    Minesweeper of wizard is an example taking a dry source material and turning into it's own property. It looked awesome and added so much to the original concepts.
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