You Didn't Quit Your Job To Make a StarCraft Knockoff

Send this to that guy you know

In my day-job I work as a software engineer at a large technology company. Over the years I’ve spoken with a number of folks who want to get out of big tech and pursue some other dream, like making an indie game. And hey, I understand the impulse - I’ve sent my own share of applications out to games companies.

My own thought on this is that everything has trade-offs; there’s not many right or wrong answers when it comes to career planning. Personally, I always think about ways to engage with games without making a major career change, like modding, or building community websites, or starting your own Substack (heh). I think for a lot of people (myself included) this is enough to “scratch the itch”, so to speak. Another thing that often gives me pause is that a very large number of people see making video games as their life’s dream, which causes the supply/demand in the labor market to be skewed, resulting in people earning substantially less money for work that is just as challenging, if not more so, than standardfare corporate software engineering.

Anyway, a meaningful number of people decide to make the jump anyway. They want to follow their dream! And I say, good for them.

StarCraft, but better

I try to play indie RTS games every now and then to stay up-to-date with the bleeding edge of the genre and see what else is out there. When I do this I try to remember that the company behind the game is probably some small studio filled with earnest and well-meaning people following their dreams and trying to make something good. And I think this helps me better empathize with the developers and write more even-handed pieces.

Unfortunately, I tend not to publish much in this space, because I have no interest in telling passionate people that their game is not very good. But what I really dislike is when I crack open a game and discover that it’s a knock-off.

I think this is a common thing in the indie space, although I can really only speak to real-time strategy. It feels to me like many indie RTS companies start and end with the premise, “We’re going to do famous game XYZ, but better”.

And that philosophy produces terrible games!

I think one place people go wrong is failing to realize how different game systems in an RTS interact with each other. If you weren’t personally there while the game was being developed, you sort of have to work backward from the final product to figure out why certain things work the way they do. Maybe that’s easy for some folks, but personally I think it’s quite hard - trying to answer that question is a theme of many of the articles I write.

Even if you’re successful in figuring out the totality of how a game works, you’re still left with another hard problem of actually changing it properly. If you redo one part of the game, you then have to go make respective changes to several other parts, because otherwise they don’t fit together anymore. And the more changes you make, the more re-organizing and re-balancing and re-designing and re-fill-me-in-ing you need to do. It’s very hard to keep this all straight while also producing a product that’s actually fun and interesting, let alone more fun and interesting than the original game you based this all on.

And as far as I can tell, a whole lot of people have invested a whole lot of resources into trying and failing to do exactly this sort of copycat game. And it just doesn’t seem to work very well. Whether it’s Warparty or A Year of Rain or Bannermen or heck, even Axiom - X but better is not a winning formula.

I actually think it’s easier to start with a few core ideas of what you want to build and develop the rest of the game downstream from that. The hard part is figuring out what those core ideas are, how they interact with each other, their trade-offs, the target audience that may enjoy them, and so forth. I recall Bruce Shelley, in an interview from a couple decades back, mentioned the team at Ensemble would spend long periods of time just prototyping ideas to figure out what would stick. And once they figured out their direction, then they would start building out the rest of the game.

You Didn’t Quit Your Job For This

Anyway, while I’d like to develop an RTS someday, I’m still putting together the pieces, and I don’t have very much personal experience in this regard. So I don’t want to get too over my skis on the practical side, because I don’t have a lot of practical advice to offer.

I write this article more from a philosophical perspective; I think players can sense when a game is a knock-off, and they don’t respond to it. “Famous game X, but better” is not appealing. It’s not creative. It is not a design vision. It is not even a vision. It’s lazy.

I’m not saying creativity is enough to put together a great game. I think Grey Goo is a reasonably creative title, and I didn’t like it very much. But the game sold well and made its mark - I reviewed it because people continuously mention it to me, year after year. And I think a big part of that is that it actually tried to do something creative, it actually felt like it had a vision. Players respond to designers with a vision. They don’t respond to knock-offs.

And again, it’s not just about novelty. All great works borrow from other great works; I would argue actually that intentionally going out and understanding other works in a space, and developing that technical understanding, is key to developing something new and fresh. Stephen King’s first piece of advice to writers is to go out and read a lot of books. Etc. There’s nothing wrong with reworking or even stealing ideas from other games.

But, as someone who’s played a lot of indie RTS, I’ve gotta tell you - there’s got to be more to your game than just theft. You need to have your own core, your own idea, your own vision. When someone asks you why the market needs yet another indie RTS game, you’ve gotta have a better answer than, “well, I liked StarCraft, but I didn’t like one aspect of the game, so I made StarCraft but with that aspect fixed”.

Nah, man. You made StarCraft but terrible!

And the thing that bothers me about this is that it probably wasn’t very easy - the people behind these games poured their blood, sweat, and tears into these things (plus, lots and lots of money!). They probably gave up a lot to make an indie game, and I think it’s a terrible waste that they did so building games that are knockoffs.

Let me give you that confidence boost, if you need it. You are the value that you add to the game. I want to see your awesome ideas! Don’t live in the shadow of some other game designer. Do your thing, and even if it’s not that great, it’ll still be better than the alternative.

So if you’re reading this, and you’re one of those folks who quit their job to make their dream indie game, my advice is: make your dream indie game!

Not someone else’s.

Until next time,
brownbear

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