So a couple discussions on fan-games have come up and something tells me that I feel like I should address the root of the concerns most of the veteran developers have about fan-games and let me start by saying that, at least for me, it has nothing to do with the IP's being used.

The big two IP's in use for most fan-games right now are Naruto and Dragonball Z. Bleach has, in the past, been part of the group but it's to a far lesser degree today than it was a couple years ago. I'm going to go out on a limb and just say that most of us actually really enjoy at least one of those two IP's. I know I was a huge DBZ nerd when I was growing up (I still am). And while I've fallen out of favor with the Naruto series, I did used to really enjoy watching it.

No one's disputing that these are great animes who are loved by a vast culture of people from all walks of life. But if that's the case, then why do people constantly shit on fan games all the time? Why do people groan and sigh and troll threads announcing a new DBZ or Naruto game? Hopefully I can clarify why, at least from my perspective, many people are hesitant to give fan games a chance and how people who enjoy producing fan games can improve and set a higher standard. Keep in mind that everything I say here is my opinion only. There are people who hate fan games solely based on the fact that they use existing IP's. There are people who have no idea why they hate fan games except that everyone else seems too. Bandwagoners like this are kind of part of the problem and less the solution.

Most fan games have one huge detail in common from one another (other than their IP's of course). This detail isn't exclusive to rips and in fact permeates almost every fan game on the website, regardless of how "orginal" the code or artwork is.

That main detail is that they are almost all RPG's. Every single one of them. I know of only one game that does not fit into this genre and it's just sad. This isn't a problem that fits only fan games either. There's a whole host of original games who fall into this trap and wonder why their completely original idea has failed.

Let me be honest with everyone here. Almost nobody in this community has the skills necessary to create an immersive, epic-scale RPG. Period. Most people just do not have the time, effort and resources required to command such a daunting project, yet day after day, week after week, I see developers flocking into the MMO genre like it's going out of style (and it kind of is). There is only one truly finished MMO-style game on BYOND and we all know which one I'm talking about (though I can't wait for #2! #PixelRealms)

The RPG genre is a dead horse that's been completely beaten to death by the standards developers have set for it. We're so used to the poor quality of other games on the website that any little saved detail feels like a massive milestone. Your game doesn't have punching bags? WOOHOOO! What a genius dev team! Your game has dungeons and quests? WOW! You guys are going places! The problem is that in any game outside of BYOND, this is the standard operating procedure. You don't get praised for having dungeons in your MMO or quests. You get praised for having exciting combat mechanics. Bosses and raids that make you think. That function more like puzzles as much as they do boss fights, that challenge your players in all skills, not just their character's stats.

The majority of the community has become complacent with substandard quality. We've let ourselves be isolated from the gaming industry as a whole and we've let ourselves fall into this vortex of unproductivity, constantly reinventing poor mechanics into slightly less-poor ones and calling it progress. This is one of the major problems, but that's a whole other discussion that I won't get into here. I feel like most people already understand this. The majority of this post is directed toward the people who develop these fan games and try to break into a genre that they're hopelessly outclassed in.

Now, I've yet to answer the question presented in the thread's title, mainly because I felt that I should set the table on the facts and general rules that can be gathered from many games on the site. But now we have to ask ourselves, how do we fix fan games? That sounds like a weird question. Most people would be content with fan games being removed from the site altogether, but that could only serve to cause even more problems. Alienating the vast majority of the regular player base would obviously be a stupid idea. Fan games are never going to go away on BYOND, no matter how many C&D letters we get, they'll always come back in one form or another.

Many new developers are learning by working with these ripped sources and these sources are setting the standards for many of the awful programming practices that permeate the dev society today. Even people who've never worked on a rip in their life find their programming style, albeit to a far lesser degree, somewhat influenced by these games, simply because the majority of people seemed to learn from them and thus that's the way they teach it.

Fan games are never going to go away, but we can make them better. There's a small group of us already, but I feel like it needs far more community support, that try not to down people for making fan games. That's what Build Your Own Net Dream means, make whatever game your heart desires. Whether the game is set in the DBZ universe or a completely new IP, it all boils down to the quality of game you produce.

On the podcast with Ter and Yut last night, the question was asked of what is the best piece of advice that you could give any new developer, and there were a lot of fantastic answers. If you haven't seen it, it should be up soon, if not already. Definitely check it out. My answer was a simple point but I feel one that not a lot of developers understand: It doesn't matter what you're designing, what you're creating or if you ever even finish it. As long as you're always learning from your mistakes and you're always making progress, nothing you do is a failure.

You can have a hundred failed projects that will never be published, but as long as with each flop you learned something new about programming or game development or art or whatever, it wasn't a failure. That unfinished project was just a stepping stone to the next project on your plate and eventually, when you're skills are more advanced and the confidence in yourself grows, you'll start finishing projects and publishing games.

It won't be anything big, at first, either. It's going to be a cool little code snippet that you post on the forums or a library or maybe a small game, if you're really confident, but the moment you post something that people go, "Hey, that's pretty cool, keep it up." that's when you know you're on the right track.

The first real piece of work that I've ever really finished and published was my particle library. It was an idea that turned into an obsession for about two weeks while I worked on it with the goal of trying to create something that could better the quality of other games on the website and, to some degree, it worked. Flick's already taking steps to producing a DMI generator for it, letting you record particle animations and set them as overlays, far more efficient than dynamic particles and actually stands a great chance of really making it viable in BYOND games and I'm extremely excited to see how it works.

I think the first step in solving the problem of low-quality fan games is to really start pushing people away from making RPG's a little harder, and stop putting so much effort into pushing people away from making fan games in general. Some of the veteran devs already discourage designing RPG's, especially as a first project. They never work, period. I've never seen a new developer successfully release a full-scale, finished MMORPG as their first project, it just doesn't happen.

New developers come onto the website and see these Naruto and DBZ fan games and see that they can make games just like that. The problem is that they're being inspired by a genre of gaming that is absolutely substandard to gaming as a whole. They're getting ideas from poorly designed games and thinking, "That's how you make a game" when that's completely wrong. It's like herding cats, they'll never listen no matter how much we bitch about, "Don't make fan games!" or "Don't make RPG's as your first project!" because they don't listen anyway.

The people we can help are those who fail. The people who finally get their game out and it flops and they feel like they've wasted all of their time and effort. The people who come back onto the forums and ask, "Why aren't people playing my game?" and that's when we can finally start making real progress. I think it's a question that we should be upfront and address early, however, because very few people actually want to admit that their game sucks. Very few novice developers want to own up to the fact that they have no clue what they're doing. I think the more we silently push people into asking better questions, the more progress we'll see. If we can answer that question without forcing people to post their apparent failures on the forums, they'll at least start learning.

We really should try to stop being jerks about fan games. We don't even have to be jerks about bad games. Making fun of someone else's game has never ended well, ever. The creator is offended and feels obligated to stonewall and defend their game to the death and when you're attacking their game design techniques, regardless of how poor they actually are, you only serve to make the problem worse, because now the creator feels like they have to prove you wrong. It's a pride thing and it's natural, we all have it to some degree. We hate seeing our projects that we work so hard on get torn to shreds by some critic, but the difference between novices and vets is how we react to criticism. Yes, it sucks to have your work knocked hard by some random stranger, it blows hard and makes you feel like shit for a minute, but if you can take their comments and try to look at it from their perspective, you just might find that they actually might have a point to some degree.

Again, as a final TL;DR, the community as a whole needs to be vocal about the genre of games new developers should be experimenting with. BYOND is a platform where MMORPG's are the default idea, but by far the worst. People are led down a rut of game design hell that will absolutely eat them alive both mentally and emotionally. It's so hard to learn from RPG's when you're only just learning how to make games. If you think fan games are principally wrong on some level, that's not what this discussion is about. It's not about the legality of fan games or the precarious C&Ds that float in from time-to-time and that's not the kind of discussion I want to see in the comments.

This thread is about educating new developers and new strategies we can take to make the more productive without trying to squash their creativity or passions. I know these posts tend to be nightmares and black holes of conversation, but I feel like this is a discussion that everyone should be involved in.

If you're reading this and you're an active developer for a fan game on the website, please please please post your opinions and views. I feel like the only way this conversation will ever truly be productive is by actually having game developers who are working on these projects in them. The more information you guys give us on your practices and design strategies and thought process when building the games, the better.

I know that threads like this are usually big, "TL;DR, we already know all of this" discussions, but fundamentally I don't think we've ever really had a true discussion about it. It's always devolved into "We need to get rid of fan games" or "We just need better quality games to set an example" without ever having any real discussion to back up how we could possible do that.

Setting a higher bar is not going to solve the issue until most games on BYOND become that standard and, quite frankly, that's not reasonable at this point. I feel like it would be easier to take the low-tier games and bounce how to educate developers into slowly raising their own standards. Fan games are super competitive with one another and when one starts doing something well, everyone else likes to jump on that bandwagon and copy them. While copying isn't really that much better, it's a step in the right direction and at least they would be copying better ideas than what's currently presented.

I don't know, maybe I'm soapboxing a bit, but I'm just really tired of hearing about fan games in such a negative light. It's a discussion that I don't think anyone really wants to have, but I feel like if we're ever going to get over this fan game = bad game mentality that we seem to have, it's one we need to talk about.