We all know the story, so many passion projects are taken down by companies and most commonly not even for reasons that make much sense.
Most recently I saw, portal 64 taken down by valve, you have to own portal, made for a dead old console.
Thats just one of many examples, which leads me to the actual question, why be under the very common threat of an uncaring ruthless company like this instead of creating something new? Or a company that doesn’t openly kick people in their butt? ( Nintendo being so prone that valve didnt even wanna bother)
People like a creative work and are creative. Do the math. Just like every cyber security person started with hacking, every creative starts with derivative works.
Portal 64 was taken down by Valve only because it used Nintendos N64 SDK which was not publicly released. Valve is cool with fanworks for the most part, even allowing them to be sold for profit (Black Mesa). Nintendo (as with most Japanese game companies) are the worst offenders of the extreme opposite.
Yeah, don’t try to remake an active, money-making game like TF2 with plans for releasing it…
As a corollary to what you mentioned, if you want to get a job in the games industry, the number one thing you can do is make a game. A straight remake is great for engineers or artists, and a remake with specific improvements is great for designers. And you don’t have to do anything from scratch, unless you are looking for a core engine type job. Using a game engine like Unreal and publicly available assets and libraries is fine. You also don’t ever have to release or announce your project. The important thing is that you will very quickly learn about the challenges of making a game. If you can start answering questions in an interview and talk about where you encountered challenges, how you researched solving them, etc., you will be that much closer to landing a job.
My guess is that people are really into the whole lore and world that they have a bunch of good ideas already. Fewer people already have a whole fictional world of their own built out. And there’s a much larger audience for the existing world, that people wouldn’t be as likely to give a new world a chance.
But I think it’s mostly because people don’t care too much at the beginning whether it’ll be taken down eventually, they just have an idea they want to exist and put out there for other people to enjoy.
Part of it might be that the fun of it for them is creating it. Additionally it might just be a fun way to learn a certain technology.
A small part of me is interested in making an nes game, and the first step for me to learn that code would be to work on a fan project and improve existing code.
Sonic games are the right fan games to make.
2D Sonic games sucked after the Genesis (with the possible exception of the Sonic Advance series), but great fan games were being pumped out.
Some of the leads on those fan games got hired to make Sonic Mania, which is basically the Sonic sequel that Sega fans had been waiting for since the mid-90’s.
funnily enough i never liked how leadlike/weighty sonic felt to me so i never really got into the og and thus never tried mania either.
1 & 2 play like that, yeah. Maybe I just had a great aftermarket controller by then but s3&k did it right imo
I think Sonic 1 can feel like that without the spindash, and the level design isn’t great for like half the stages.
It’s all about being able to keep the momentum going, and they get better at designing levels around it with every game. If you’ve only played Sonic 1 but want to try again, skip it and hop into Sonic 2 and 3/Knuckles.
Sonic does play differently to Mario, but if you can give it the time to get that momentum going, you might enjoy it!
ill consider it in the future, thank you
Most recently I saw, portal 64 taken down by valve, you have to own portal, made for a dead old console.
Maybe edit the bits around so it goes through and say that your whatever is heavily influenced of X?
