They got there first...

News & General Discussion
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How many times, have you thought of a game or a feature to a existing genre that you had been working on for X amount of time; and than low and behold someone else (usually a Triple A studio or a large independent studio) actually has already done it and released it or revealed it for future release?

I have had a couple game ideas I worked on here and there only to have a game released by the big boys that actually uses the idea I was thinking about or was working on.

Some examples include in the Wii U game ZombiU, when the player dies they get a auto randomly generated new player character to control and their previous toon is now a zombie they can kill to get supplies from. I actually thought of that way back, about a year or so before ZombiU came out or the feature was even revealed.

No big deal of course I was just floored someone else thought of it.

What experiences have you had with this?

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They were probably working on that game for 3 years or more before they revealed it - so they had the idea first. :wink:

Funny topic though -
When I was in college I decided to create an animation with a character returning home and her side kick was a donkey and when she arrived she had to defeat the dragon, and the only way to defeat the dragon was with help from the donkey.
When I was about half way through the modeling process of the dragon, donkey was already finished - Dreamworks released the first Shrek trailer -
A slightly bit better than my animated short - but had similar basic plots of a character with a donkey side kick who has to battle a dragon. They stole my idea! :smile:

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I’ve had some ideas that were made real by people with more time and resources than me, and I know a lot of people who’ve experienced the same. It’s always best to have this happen while you’re still in the planning stage, so I suggest laziness :wink:

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Constantly.

I’ve had ideas in high school that are turning up in games now. Like most of Final Fantasy XV, yeah, I had a game just like that thought up in like, 2004 (Of course, my story probably would have been better
). But back then I (and pretty much no one else really) had the resources to build such a game

So now I make my ideas so completely insane that no one but me wants to make them :smile:

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Tried that, and Impossible Creatures happened.

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That’s completely true, but for my knowledge at that time was that no one had that idea. I thought it was cool and so wrote out some stuff and a little bit of code.

Idea was to only save the game data in relation to the progression and than player data. So when you completed a story mission, the game would not save until you got back to the main base. If you died before that, than you would get a new player toon and would have to complete the mission again. Player toon would be a randomly generated toon so could be anything from African-American male to an Asian-American female. Tall, short, fat, skinny, etc.

But if you got back than the current position in the story would be saved and the player data would be saved with what ever gear you had. This is sort of what they did with ZombiU; which they probably had at the beginning (as you mentioned) on the drawing board years before I had the idea. Some would say great minds think alike! :slight_smile:

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It happens so often, that you might as well stop caring about it. Essentially it means, that ideas are not unique and multiple people get the same idea at the same time.

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You just aren’t crazy enough then. Think crazier!

You think ideas like Katamari Damacy or Metal Wolf Chaos came from the minds of sane people? Theres a reason no one did those ideas first.

If you really think about it, a lot of the biggest games of all time were straight up crazy. Like Pokemon, or Metal Gear Solid.

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If it happen it’s because you have the same interest and taste than most people. :wink: Vary your taste, go obscure, niche, crazy, then adapt back to your original taste.

Most original stuff don’t come from what you want but what you solve, just like this scene in the house of the flying dagger, where the director blended snow on top of a scene at the climax of the movie. The movie is a well made super polish wuxia, its’ all sort of amazing craft and visual, but a simple blend got you say “holyshit that’s beautiful”. That entire scene was an accident, it start snowing and they didn’t have the budget to reshoot the scene, so he just continued shooting and blended the scene for mock continuity, it end up being the highlight of the movie :smile:!

The moral is, it doesn’t matter what you start with, if someone else has the same idea, idea are cheap, execution matter, and execution will put constraint on you are forced you to solve, leading to better ideas. Even when you idea isn’t original, hitchcock said it better: “start with a clichĂ©, don’t end up with them”! :stuck_out_tongue:

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And there are like a million games that have already been done. Trust me, no matter what you think of, itÂŽs already been done close enough to where nobody can tell the difference.

The idea is the easy part, the work and dedication to get it done is what matters. But I think it is just a fact now that no matter what game you make, some player will have played some obscure game and call you a thief.

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I had a few chapters of a novel where a princess was turned into a frog down at the same time Disney released the Frog Princess movie.

I simply see it as proof that ideas are (almost) worthless, and execution is everything. Disney executed the idea and is now making money from it. I got bored and never went beyond a few chapters.

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Same thing. Last year I had a character in a novel who would reach under the ground and grab a tree root in order to have visions of other places. Then GoT season 5 came out and I had to rewrite the character.

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In fairness that was a thing in the last book. That book came out about five years ago.

I would also suggest not changing things just because of accidental collision. ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. Pretty much whatever you can come up with has been tried before.

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I donÂŽt read fiction, actually never even hear of GoT until halfway through season 1 on HBO.

Normally I would agree with you, which is what I was saying earlier But for something as iconic and unusual as Bran, just would be too obvious to use in anything else.

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You really don’t read much do you? :stuck_out_tongue:

There is very little that is unique in Brandon’s character. In fact A Song of Ice and Fire as a whole has very little that is unique, in terms of individual characters. I’m pretty sure if pressed I could name pre existing characters that match pretty much every character in the books.

What makes the series unique is that George R.R. Martin has taken away the kid gloves. For a long time fantasy and science fiction novels have been dominated by the idea that good always wins. The hero always beats the bad guy. The underdog will find a way to beat the bully. A Song of Ice and Fire ignores traditional morality and runs with the idea that the guy who is best with a sword/army/politics wins. That is the core idea that made Game of Thrones a success.

Dragging this back to games, I think knowing what parts of your idea are ‘core’ is important.

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It’s “a thing”. Basically whenever you get the idea there are a few others around the same time who also get the idea. And there were probably others who got the idea before you. And there will be still others who come up with the great idea sometime later.

It happens for all things not just games. I remember long ago when I was programming on the C64 I started thinking of ways to squeeze stuff into a smaller amount of space. I went through several ideas and discovered each algorithm I designed seemed to handle certain types of data better. For example Repetitive Byte Reduction (which I later found in a magazine was actually called Run Length Encoding) worked well for images with large areas of the same color but failed with other data such as complex images and game data.

Then I came up with the idea of scanning the data to identify the most common bytes and these would then be assigned to bits I think it was the most common 16 bytes assigned to 4 bits as in 0000 and there was a marker bit after that determined if the next number was to be read in as 8 bits and treated as a straightforward value or as 4 bits and looked up in the table. Something along those lines. MCBR I later found in another magazine as Most Common Byte Compression. It was pretty interesting how they even named these things almost identical. I don’t know why I went with Reduction instead of Compression. I guess it made sense to me at the time.

Finally I came up with the idea of building a hybrid system. A separate table was included in the compressed file that described the compressed data. Basically it was just a series of pointers (offsets) in the compressed data that identified whether that data was in RPR or MCBR and how many bytes or bits were in that chunk. This one I never came across later in a magazine but I am certain that others were figuring it out at the same time.

So I always think every time I come up with an idea there are probably a dozen other people around the world who also had that same idea the same time perhaps the same hour and maybe second. lol Others may have came up with the idea a year ago and others will have this great idea to tell their friends about next year.

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Look up the “Birthday Problem” or “Birthday Paradox”. Things that intuitively seem like they shouldn’t happen often are actually a lot more common than we may intuitively think.

The idea or the feature don’t really matter. There are loads of ideas that get reused constantly, even among highly successful stuff. Go have a look at the influences behind Star Wars. Or the things that Pixar, DeamWorks, etc. all do exactly the same way movie after movie. Or the formulas applied to storytelling.

Originality is cool, but it’s also hugely overrated. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t try to make original things. Still, something isn’t good just because it’s original, and something isn’t necessarily better because it’s “more” original, and having seen something similar before isn’t necessarily a bad thing (in fact it’s often a good thing, because you can use that to take advantage of your audience’s expectations).

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It’s often called ‘steam engine time’. It’s a surprisingly common cultural phenomena. Has happened quite frequently in history, from agriculture to writing to steam engines to flight to mobile phones. It’s also common in music and literature and art.

Turns out that if you provide all of the right precursors, and all of the same cultural influences, people will come up with the same ideas, even if they have never interacted at all. It’s like putting together a puzzle, if all the pieces are there two people on opposite sides of the world can make the same picture.

The phenomenon also works the opposite way. Turns out wothout all of the right puzzle pieces it’s incredibly difficult to duplicate the same feats of creativity. Which is why we are never likely to see the likes of the great pyramids or the Beatles or Doom again. Sure we will have other great things, but we are unlikely to have the same great things.

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Pretty much a constant thing for me. I won’t even bother giving examples. Lots and lots. @angrypenguin is quite right on all accounts, originality is nice and all
 but it’s largely dependent upon the sophistication of the audience, for example there is literally nothing you can put in front of me that I would consider novel. Take a 14-year-old beginning game developer whose primary experience with games has been stick games on mobile, and everything is new to him.

The penguin and the zombie always like to say that ideas are not worth much on their own, its all in the execution. So even if they got there first, doesn’t necessarily mean they did it best and for absolute certain it doesn’t mean that anybody will instantly negate you for creating a solid imitation, if the real world is any example
 people will branch off and enjoy various imitations just because they loved the “original” so much. The joke of course being, everything is an imitation, it’s the dirty little secret that all inventors, artists and creative types worth their salt know all-too-well.

Go through the quotes on this page: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/originality.html

Notice the common theme? It’s pretty apparent. There is no originality. It’s trivial what you do, of the utmost importance is how you do it and if you’re any good than it becomes important why you do what you do, to some people, anyway. I could go on a massive tangent about people engaging in creative endeavors for the wrong reasons or going about it wrong, but I won’t. Cause I need to learn 3D character modeling and animating, like
 5 years ago.

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About originality, I think there is a difference between being a creative and a creator.

I spend my whole life trying to learn creative techniques to never be stuck while creating. Things like inversion, exaggeration, substraction, accumulation etc 
 you start with something and through a series of almost logical operation you end up with something “new”. Basically the taught version of everything is a remix. And work well, very very well, it can produce many great idea in an instant because it allow to consciously move the fine line between the familiar and the unfamiliar, aka be original. It’s quite easy, it’s entirely contextual and knowing the social and cultural value of that context and play with it.

For example there was this guy who had this amazing idea, he thought was original, of a decadent loner vampire guy in a world of eternal foggy night. I don’t know about the genre but it seems rather clichĂ©. I use inversion a bit, and it give a woman vampire in a world of eternal day, this is directly more interesting vampire + day create contradiction and poses stakes. I use justification to create a background that explain eternal days. So there was a war between human and vampire (clichĂ©) and human attempt to win by deploying mirror in orbit to reflect back the sun and erase night forever. It’s too straightforward so let’s add a twist, the vampire still win. Now I need to explain why they win, well erasing the night created a global warming who turn the planet into mostly desert and destroyed crops, vampire just got underground. And this give them the upper hand because now human need them to survive, which lead to human trafficking, etc 
 idea are cheap and infinitely mutable and adaptable.

Despite all these techniques, I still ended stuck.Why? because creativity for the sake of it is not what human really want. We generally want more, that’s why there is starving artist in the name of their art. We want meaning, and unbeknownst to me I want that without realizing it. And remix don’t give you that at all, it’s not helping not a single bit. And finding that bit and how to express it makes you a creator. The thing is the final result might still be close to existing form.

And that’s something I learn, any new idea would need to be expressed in term of old idea, and looking at them people will say it’s just a remix, missing the point. It’s like if you have the idea of a car in the neolithics, it will mostly be an assemblage of rock, leaf and wood, but in the modern area it will use other material and forms. Everything is not a remix.

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