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Comment by danielbarla | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the success! I stumbled across Curious Expedition a while back, bought it on Steam and had a few playthroughs (of varying success). It's a very cool game, and despite being a developer, I had no idea it was HTML5. If hiding that fact was a goal, then you've succeeded there too.

Since you've already answered some of the technical questions, I have a random non-technical one. In some ways, Curious Expedition is extremely similar to Renowned Explorers (~ identical plot?). To be clear, I think there's plenty of room for both games - especially since the gameplay is nothing alike - and I'm glad both exist. But did this happen by accident? I'm curious because there seems to be a trend of various things emerging in pairs (good examples are Hollywood movies, e.g. the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact coming out with similar plots within months of each other).

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Thank you! We became aware of Renowned Explorers after we had been working on The Curious Expedition for about 2 years already and stumbled into them at Gamescom.

I won't deny that it was initially a shock to see a game that superficially seemed so close to Curious Expedition, but as you said there is more than enough space for both games and playing them they are definetely quite different from each other.

Over the years we met the folks from Abbey Games a couple of times and developed a friendship. Last year we decided to poke fun at the whole situation and did a joint bundle on Steam. The bundle has ended at the moment, but the page is still online:

    http://curiousvsrenowned.com

To this day being able to collaborate with them and turning this potentially sour situation into something fun was one of the best experiences I had as an indie developer.

That's awesome, I had no idea the situation had been so well explored! Glad both sides took it lightheartedly.

I ended up with both games in my collection separately, and was pretty shocked at the plot. What are the chances of that happening randomly!? I thought there may be a common thread I missed, but this is far more hilarious.

I must say, same story for me. I played your game on Steam a good while ago, maybe even a year ago? And could never have guessed at how it was made.

I liked it because it doesn't try to hold your hand.

I've heard the movie plot twins phenomenon is because multiple studios will want a script and start assembling a team around it but one will outbid the other for the rights to the script. The losing studio will then pay a ghostwriter to create a similar script so they can continue with their plans.

Another theory is a lower budget production produces a similar movie to kind of 'draft' the marketing success of the main movie. These are called mockbusters

In this case I think it's just closer to pure coincidence, or sharing the same zeitgeist. I was heavily involved in the indie comic community for a long while and we would see this all the time. You would write a script and start talking to other writer friends about it and they would mention another book that was nearly identical or also be working on a near identical script. It's weird but just happens in creative fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films

For Armageddon and Deep Impact, I heard that it can be explained by scripts circulating around Hollywood before being put in production by a studio, so one idea can easily be copied

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