IP & sharing game ideas
Forgive me. I am new here. A few questions if you don't mind.
If you are working on a game why is it a good idea to share that game in this forum? What about the protection of IP? How does one guard against that?
I do understand that one would be introducing the game to a large group of people who love games, and enjoy playing games so this could be an awesome way of building interest, and possible resource.
I would love thoughts and insight on the IP issue and why sharing is a good idea.
I would also like to ask about open source or a distributed approach to games. Has there ever been an open source type game project in SA where people volunteered resource to build a game[s]?
If you are working on a game why is it a good idea to share that game in this forum? What about the protection of IP? How does one guard against that?
I do understand that one would be introducing the game to a large group of people who love games, and enjoy playing games so this could be an awesome way of building interest, and possible resource.
I would love thoughts and insight on the IP issue and why sharing is a good idea.
I would also like to ask about open source or a distributed approach to games. Has there ever been an open source type game project in SA where people volunteered resource to build a game[s]?
Comments
Not sure I fully agree, but I do know there is a gigantic gap between having an idea and executing it successfully (or even unsuccessfully!).
I guess that with experience comes insight and confidence - which makes understanding potential much easier. People at this level are probably not posting their concepts online for feedback - or at least until they have unpacked their thoughts more.
People new to the market, and production in general, will probably benefit from more dialogue and tips from seasoned pros.
Want some game ideas? Here, I'll give you some:
* A survival game where you appease gods through the crafting of clever hats, earning food and weapons as a reward
* A zoo management simulator where half the game is kidnapping alien species to round out your herds
* A corporate espionage game where you play a janitor who has to sneak documents out of offices without getting caught
* A simulator where you terraform planets by fiddling with the composition of the basic bacteria, then watching what they end up doing
* A procedural squad-based zombie shooter where you guide survivors to safety by travelling back in time and changing the way cities are laid out
There's a few ideas. I'm working on none of them. Every developer here has far more ideas than they have games. If they had the time to build the games they wanted to build, they'd be working on their own ideas, not someone else's - and they never have enough time :)
In terms of open-source gaming there's no projects that I know of locally, and very few that I know of globally. Open-source is not a great medium for game dev though. Great games have great creative direction, and creative direction is the polar opposite of everything open source stands for. At best you're gonna get lowest-common-denominator, mediocre games with hundreds of mods.
a goat simulator?
Oh, also, in terms of open source game development, I guess they're an exception but Unreal Tournament seems to be doing that at the moment.
Several small games have undergone similar things on these forums in the past, where if a game posted looked as if it had potential, there'd be other people offering their services to help out (whether it's art, or audio, or whatever). It's a pretty cool way to test whether something's on the right track or not, if there are a whole lot of responses and people are excited with your game, or very few replies.
Elyaradine & Wogan especially have made some good points. Game dev is an exploratory exercise. What's spec'ed is what the designer (who is often also lead developer, in indie circles, and thus swamped) can reasonably foresee. There are always going to be a 1001 things you didn't drill down into until you actually write the prerequisite section of code, and then go "Ah! Must soon look at how x and y will work, now that this part is coded up." And so on, ad nauseum.
This iteration is required over everything from big ideas (e.g. available player strategies) to the smallest mechanisms (like how fast does this creature turn). What that means is initial estimates are often off, and it also means if fine-grained decisions are left to others to develop and ratify, then unfortunately the original designer's idea may be represented in a way they never intended. Yes, you can do open source collaboration. You'd need to make sure your spec is very complete - which is nigh impossible unless you're writing a clone - and that you've a lot of available time to spend guiding your team members continuously as they work... but volunteers don't appreciate being overmanaged, and keep their own schedules.
Teams that have worked together in the past are like a group of musicians who know how to get a good groove going. An indefinable chemistry can develop that improves efficiency, often by reducing explicit communication to a bare minimum. This is a Very Good Thing to have. This usually requires that the team are all paid to stay and work together, so if "open source" equals "volunteer development" you can also see how this might not be the best formula for team efficiency, as people come and go and not everyone is very serious about making the best go of it, and knowledge may be lost from the project, and need to be regained as that process continues... all of which can cost a lot of time, and ultimately can be (and often has been) the death knell for such projects.
It comes down to, if you want people to work well on your brainchild, you either have to pay them, or the project has to be truly exceptional, or you must accommodate them in whatever other ways necessary to keep them onboard and focused, usually by ensuring they get exactly the sort of skills development they joined the project to gain (for the old CV) - not easy.
And it's catch-22 - people won't volunteer till they can see it's going somewhere. Getting that far is usually a lot of work.
I live in Potchefstroom and as you can guess there is no game development scene whatsoever. This makes it hard to get quality feedback on my games. Sure family and friends help but its just not the same as feedback from another game developer.
On the forums we have a huge amount of talent as well as members with tons of experience. This (mostly) results in incredibly valuable feedback for the creator on their project, which in turn results in the creator getting better at making games a lot faster than he/she would have without the feedback.
That being said.. I know of some devs who avoid the forums (because of the constant arguments) and instead send prototypes directly to other people they trust. I think that works just as well but you need to make a bunch of experienced developer friends first and I guess the fastest way to do that would be by interacting on the forums, which is kind of ironic.
As for the cloning concerns : I wouldn't worry too much about that. The way I see it is that once you get cloned you know that your gamedev skills have evolved to a point where you can consistently make awesome stuff. Also the chances of getting cloned on this forum is pretty slim in general.
Welcome BTW ;)
There will always be a risk to sharing even a tiny bit of information about your game. Some of it you can legally protect against, but often the most important parts you cannot legally protect. If someone copies your ideas it can be (and usually is) really crappy. The reality is that it is relatively unlikely for someone to copy your work (because let's face it: it might not be worth copying), but it is still a significant possibility.
So, let's have a look at the potential benefits: you can talk about your game (don't underestimate this one), marketing is easier, it can be really rewarding to see people playing your game, you can get valuable feedback, you can see if people want to play your game, you can more easily recruit people to the team, you can grow a community, ...
However, this is also assuming that not showing your game is a neutral decision, but a very real risk of not showing your game is that: you waste your time by working on features that are bad, you do things in the wrong order, you are forced to redo large things, and (most importantly) you might end up with a game that no body wants to play.
So for me the question really is: can you afford to not show your game to as many people as you can?
http://makegamessa.com/discussion/749/read-first-the-makegamessa-faq
We really should sticky this or put it somewhere prominent again.
TL;DR Playtesting gives feedback, but choose how public/often you are comfortable with.
The major benefit of sharing the game is the feedback you get from playtesting.
Developing a game with "hermit" selftesting is not impossible but ill-advised.
You can trade risk for limited exposure during feedback...
FROM
- Having an extra small physical meeting with a group of trusted playtesters. This limits the feedback and is usually a bit biassed. (Optional - Have them sign a non-disclosure form)
TO
- Having the whole world playtest it. (tremendous feedback)
There is no bullet proof safeguard against plagiarism, however I personally haven't observed any such behavior here.
With Open source.
Here are two threads for shared work on this forum....
makegamessa.com/discussion/3223/super-simple-state-machine-for-unity#latest
makegamessa.com/discussion/3195/tutorials-free-grass-for-your-unity#latest
Of course there is also a ton of additional stuff online, and in the Unity asset store.
I've got more links ready to go, but how about I say inflammatory things first? Cool? Okay, here goes:
Sharing your game in some form as early as you possibly can has absolutely no downsides.
Every single risk people associate with sharing their games is imaginary. It's fine if you want to protect your ego or you don't like criticism, but then you're going to have to live with the fact that you're making bad games because your ego and insecurities are making business and artistic decisions for you. That's not how anyone becomes a good game developer. What does anyone's ego know about games?
Having your idea stolen is a joke!
An idea is very different to a game (as many posters here have pointed out). If you tell someone an idea and they make something that seems similar, cool. You're getting two different interpretations of that core idea. Yay for another game existing!
Getting cloned/plagiarised...
This is when someone actively copies your existing game in order to sell it themselves, usually in a market you're not reaching yourself. I prefer calling this plagiarism because "cloning" is so muddily defined that people have really annoying fights over the word far too often. Going open and sharing your game as early as possible is the best way to both prevent plagiarism AND fight it if it does occur. If you do happen to make a game someone else feels they can make a quick buck from, they'll copy you anyway - just look at Zynga. Having your game be visible in the public eye is the best way to prevent someone from copying it, but don't believe me, here's Rami Ismail speaking in an interview: Criticism burnssssss usss!
Deal. Get better at listening and figure out how to take something useful from whatever it is people give you. The worst thing that can happen is people ignore your game. Not being ignored, even if it's to be told things that make you feel like a complete failure and want to hide in a corner forever, means people see potential or value. That's a gift and you should treat it as such, even if they don't mean it that way.
Even if, for argument's sake, someone IS actually just ripping on you because they're an enormous asshole - what better way to get back at them than to make your game better by using the very things they "attacked" you with? Also, this never happens. If you think it's happening, you're wrong.
Patents, trademarks and copyrights
IANAL, that honor belongs to another on this board. But! *waves finger around* These things are actually pretty simple... Patents are not something you care about unless you're actually making hardware and are already rich. Trademarks are things you get for your games if you ever make a sequel to an existing thing, or get huge enough to make physical merch. Copyright you get instantly as soon as you publish your game anywhere, yay! So, publish your game somewhere as early as possible to get that copyright protection.
Narrative games can't do open development
Okay, fine. So you're worried that your story-driven game is going to get spoiled if you post it before it's done. That's perfectly logical if: 1. Only the people that you physically show it to that very first time are ever going to play it, nobody else. 2. You're capable of producing a 100% stable, contains-no-errors game with zero outside testing. 3. Being "spoiled" matters.
1. Is destroyed by Infinite Audience Theory, which goes something like "You will never reach everyone on the planet that will enjoy playing your game, so there's always an essentially infinite audience waiting out there for it" - provided, of course, that it's a good game that people will actually want to play. There will always be people willing to play your game that haven't been "spoiled" yet.
2. Your game will always have issues. Those need testing and discovery so you can fix them... You'll never be done fixing them either, so don't worry about releasing a final version of anything, that won't happen. At least you'll know that you can keep putting versions up in front of people and your star testers will tell you that the spelling error from three months ago in the secret cave is back.
3. How many times have you read that book you love, or played that game you know every line of dialog to, or watched that movie over and over again? We like re-experiencing things if we enjoy them the first time, games are especially good at this because re-experiences can often be novel in some way.
Narrative games should get released as often and early as everything else you're making. You really want to know if your story/writing isn't catching people before you write too much of it. And no, excessive worldbuilding is not how good game narrative works.
Bonus round: NDAs!
NDAs are useless. Besides being borderline unenforceable (flash the Nick-signal if you really must know why), NDAs aren't worth anything to a game development studio. If someone insists on NDAs to just talk about an idea, that's my cue to exit the conversation. It's not going to be a great idea. Sorry, but it just isn't. Plus, if I happen to have a similar idea that I'm already working on and they're really keen on their protective legalese, they might try to sue me if I continue to make it and release something, so no thanks.
Feel free to lob more "risks" at me so I can shoot them down ;) Every single open-source game project I've seen started since 2001 (I wasn't really watching before that) in South Africa has failed. Most failed without even the gumption to do so horribly, they tend to just fizzle out. I suspect it's because people who want to make games are a fractious bunch, any game project will be full of fighting. If you can resolve a fight by just forking the project and making your own thing, any given open-source game project will eventually just turn into a herd of lone warriors doing their own things on slightly different, equally incomplete games.
P.S. Code sharing happens here all the time though. Usually after people have posted a project and are visibly having some sort of issue with it, then others share their solutions to those problems. That doesn't mean that a Unity package is open-source though - it's not using any specific OSS license.
But seriously I think that pretty much answers the question.
Are you asking because you have a project you are thinking about sharing, or because you're interested in starting a dialogue? Both are great, I only ask because, if it's the former, then I would be more interested to hear your opinion on the replies.
I would like to write an article about this. Would you be amenable to me using your responses but obviously quoting each of you in the article. If so, should I quote your forum names or your real names or both?
We had a great conversation and Rodain told me a lot about the local game culture. We spoke about the game, and Rodain offered me incredible insights [what a friggin' smart/remarkable human]. Now if I was an asshole would that have happened?
It really made me think. I also love the whole open source culture and peer-to-peer. I think a lot about how capitalism could be different if it wasn't so hierarchical. The open source philosophy and the peer-to-peer movement, and game making/makers I believe have massive contributions to make to the world in terms of philosophy/ideology. And goodness knows we need a new way of thinking about commerce and money.
So that is where the question came from.
I loved reading your long response.
The good thing about coming to gaming after being in writing is that the criticism is likely to burn less.
In my writing career I have been subject to the ultimate super monster - the editors [Ganondorf; GLaDOS; Bowser and Arthas Menethil don't even come close].
Then there's the crowd. I've been called Jabba the Hut's wife. A vaginal discharge. A renegade Afrikaner [wtf - I'm English]. A polemicist [was that an insult]. Besides eating humble pie hopefully makes one a little less of an asshole. We all need that every now and again.
I think what spooks me is I have had a major piece of work plagiarised. Stolen and entered into an award. And the person who did this walked away with a R100k prize. And I petitioned my editor, the prize organisers, this person. Nader.
But I'm a lover of George Michael. You've got to have faith. We've all been burned before. We've just got to big up. Get over it. Move on. Become better, not bitter.
[Edit/ About the criticism. Let me be hardcore honest. If I posted my game here and everyone hated it - absolutely hated it - there might be tears at bed time.]
OMG. How did you do that thing in your avatar with your hair. I am having serious jealousy issues here.
On a more serious note everthing you say makes such sense. Thank you.
Potch? I went to school in Potch.
I must say I am really loving getting to know people in the SA games industry. Really awesome, smart people.
And. There are arguments. Are we talking epic. Are we talking mega slushy and max pack of popcorn arguments. Phwoar. I can't wait. :)
Would you mind expanding on this thinking for me so I can understand you.
I've started a couple of businesses but what I thought they would be - and where they ended up - are two different things.
I have also been asked to volunteer writing on projects. Often. So I really get what you are saying abot the volunteering bit. Really resonates.
I'm glad you managed to have what sounds like an awesome discussion with Rodain ( @Nandrew ). I'm kinda interested to hear more about this project now... :)
That really sucks. If your work was copied verbatim I believe copyright applies and I think you might have good cause for legal action. Still really crappy this happened to you, sorry :(
That said, that really does suck and you really should consider pursuing legal actions, or at the very least show the world (if they care, and the game dev community around the world really cares) who the dick is and turn the situation around to work for you. Noone likes a thief in the creative industry.
(If you got enough hate on your game that tears in bed were warranted, you may actually be onto something. It's the ones that sink into obscurity that really deserve tears :P)
Hi Francois. Thanks so much for your comments. Yes. It burned. It was a year of depression for me. Basically I never took legal action because as a working class journalist the law isn't that accessible. The most wonderful part about all of this is that a book was produced and this person put this story in that book and didn't credit me - again. I looked into getting the book disrupted and pulped, but the legal costs were enormous, I would have been fighting a major multinational publishing company with more money for legal resource than I could ever muster, and there were former colleagues of mine who's work was also published in that book, which meant I would penalise them. It was a Catch22 situation. So I walked away resolving to try and put the horrible episode beside me, and to do good work. To push myself to be better and better.
It is likely that I will write a book called "Adventures In The World of Journalism" sometime, which will be incredibly interesting. And will include a very interesting chapter about the time my partner and I were commissioned by a US investigative journalism centre to do hard core, investigative journalsm work in the nuclear sector. Holy crap - did that forever remove any romanticism I had left about what journalism is. It was also an incredibly deep insight into the world of American Corporate Lobbying. So ja. But I have a novel to finish first.
Thanks for your kind word. I will DM you if I have any further questions.
Thanks for your thoughts. Please see my response to Francois above. The issue with the world of journalism is that it is very small, and if you are litigious it is likely you'll never get work again. Particularly if you are freelancer. And then there's the issue of legal costs. And the time.
My revent will be served cold in the form of a book.
And obscurity. Oh dear lord. Yes. I have spent the better past of the last nine months writing a novel. The thought of no-one reading it is pretty daunting. I keep on telling myself it is the journey. This and that there is some strange kind of alternative romance in failure.
Like the master said: "Do. Or do not. There is no try."
My 2 cents in agreement:
The sooner you share and deal with feedback on your project, the faster you get to your MVP (Minimal Viable Product).
Just do not underestimate the effort to maintain the communication once people start giving you feedback, positive or negative.
If your unsure if you are sharing to early, ask yourself when will you give a stranger the time of the day to playtest / responds, etc. to their post.
Also, get to know the people and support them first, then when they are not strangers, they are more likely to support you.