We have seen many changes lately and a lot of people missing the point of rips and fan games. Rips are bad, no further discussion needed there. Fan games do have a good side that I see a lot of people miss. They are good for learning and perfecting your development style and a good way to draw in an audience to your style. This is much like a new band going out and playing cover songs. But, still the original source must be credited for their work.
Now a developer has a fan game that is drawing in players. They have learned the system and know their coding style, it's time to make an original game. You have a community now of players that hopefully are playing the game for your style and not the license alone. They may be willing to help with art and music if you ask. After all now they see what quality of work you can do.
The fan game is great practice and hopefully you learn a lot from making one or two. I had worked on my first fan game for a few years constantly redoing things and learning new ways of doing things. My final released fan game is about to come out and it will mark the end of my learning development and a transition into new things. While my art style still is poor and I have nothing to compose music with, I know have the coding skill to make a game I want to make and a community that will play it when it is released.
In conclusion this is a good path for most developers to go. By the time you give us that original game, it will be of high quality and will help bring in new players to Byond.
I understand why Tom doesn't want the front page covered with fan games, but I do agree that they can be beneficial. When I want to make a game, its often a lack of ideas or artwork that holds me up. By using ideas and graphics from other games you can get better at programming without having to worry about everything else.
Fan games can also be a trap. People often get carried away with copying ideas from other places that they forget they're making a game. Perfectly copying a character's hair style becomes more important than having fun gameplay. | |
Our inquisition will not stop. Even if we must burn down entire towns to uproot one single offender, then so be it, their sacrifice will have been for the greater good. We are witch hunters, and we will crucify anyone who makes an unoriginal game on BYOND.Honestly, BYOND has had some excellent fan games. I really enjoyed DWMA2 back when that was still around. :(