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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

The amount of work that has gone into the menus is simply phenomenal - the hard part was often not the graphics, but figuring out the commands (following the wiki tutorials helped me a bunch).

Tarn deserves praise for his work - and it’s a bit sad that we don’t have more passion projects like this.

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I believe Caves of Qud have also been under development for about 15 years: https://www.cavesofqud.com/

And there are of course the timeless classics that inspired these- nethack, angband & dungeon-crawl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_PBfLbd3zw

Never in my life was I expecting to find a Merchants Guild member on HN.

I had to check when Unity was released, apparently 2005. Was Caves of Qud always using Unity or switched to Unity afterwards?

It's a relatively recent switch and as far as i understood it's still running the original in headless mode and communicates with unity, with the unity program basically only being the front end for the game.

Those passion projects exist you just haven't heard about them. Unfortunately , we're past the point where reach is free and organic. You now need to pay if you wanna be heard.

> You now need to pay if you wanna be heard.

Citation needed. Plenty of games get picked up and become popular organically. How much did they spend on Minecraft's marketing? Fortnite? Factorio? KSP?

Most of your examples first popped up 10 or so years ago give or take, when organic reach was still possible. The only one that didn't was fortnite (Dec 2017) but it's a far cry from a small indie project, it came from a AAA developer that not only had multiple well known games, was also behind the unreal engine, one of the most popular game engines.

Define organic and payment. We still have successful indie games exploding in success, mostly on its quality. It's just that the threshold for "quality" is higher with more competition around. So not any little crappy project becomes automatically successful, nor does the hundred clone of something gains any attention just because it makes something different.

> it’s a bit sad that we don’t have more passion projects like this

Check out UnReal World, which Tarn cites as a source for his own inspiration (and is itself still under active development and also now available on Steam): https://www.unrealworld.fi/

Do not forget Unrealworld:

http://www.unrealworld.fi/

oh and Aurora4x...probably no really a game:

https://aurora2.pentarch.org/

For 4x-type games, there was a recent v1 global release of Remnants of the Precursors[0], made by a single dev who participates to the related subreddit[1]. The upcoming Falling Frontier[2] is also a one-man dev team iirc.

As a person struggling with day-to-day due to mental health issues, all the people working on such projects truly are an inspiration - and on top of that we get good games :)

[0] https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/rotp/

[2] https://www.gog.com/game/falling_frontier

Stardew Valley.

stardew valley is a rip off harvest moon and still took 4 years to develop.

dwarf fortress has alot of fully original concepts, and has been in development for 20 years.

It's definitely a rip off (or, 'inspired by' to put it more kindly), but Stardew managed to make it much more enjoyable and feature-rich than the long Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons lines - and by just the one guy.

But there's a lot of others like that. Hollow Knight is a better Metroid / Castlevania. Shadow of Tsushima is a better Assassin's Creed. Final Fantasy XIV is a better World of Warcraft. Dwarf Fortress is a better Rogue/Nethack. I will go into hiding now.

I think he saw the potential for a HM-like to be far more feature-rich, and correctly predicted that it would be well received. The HM series was basically stagnant, but they were the only game in town.

Strongly disagree about Hollow Knight, but it's greater than the sum of its parts.

Is it a rip off? I'm sure multiple people can have the same ideas.

Vampire Survival released a few months ago, while Magic Survival was released a few years ago. They're extremely similar games.

I guess at the end it depends on what's your definition of rip off.

Is Torchlight a rip off of Diablo or do they just use similar mechanics and ideas?

Stardew Valley is unashamedly a Harvest Moon rip off. This isn’t a bad thing though, Concerned Ape took a formula that the original creators had been phoning in for years and created the best version of that formula ever made.

Diablo invented a genre, Torchlight, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile carry the torch (ha) further. I don't believe they ever denied Diablo's influence and inspiration on them.

Is League of Legends a DotA ripoff (the mod), or is DotA (the full game) a League of Legends ripoff?

Not your point, but League of Legends, DOTA2 (DOTA is a the trademarked, Valve name, DotA for the mod) and Heroes of NewEarth all had had people who worked on at least a version of the original DotA All Stars mod so technically they're all equally sequels or continuations. It's Heroes of the Storm and SMITE that are the rip-offs :).

Or at the very least, League, DOTA2, and HoN (may it soon RIP) are all equally rip-offs of the original mods.

> Is Torchlight a rip off of Diablo or do they just use similar mechanics and ideas?

Well, Torchlight had designers from Diablo 1 & 2 on the team as well as Diablo's composer/sound designer, so it's a bit of a special case.

Torchlight is made by 2 of the Diablo/Diablo 2 developers.

It's definitely strongly influenced by Stardew Valley and reuse some of its mechanics and gameplay loops but it does add a lot to them.It's as much a ripoff of it than Rayman is a ripoff of Mario and Half Life a ripoff of Doom. It's very much a sprawling game. It's not surprising it took a long time to develop.

no matter your opinion about the game itself, it's valid mentioning it as a passion project though

Are all FPS games DOOM ripoffs?

Technically, the Touhou games should also qualify as such. Though they're basically iterations of each other (sometimes with different mechanics), they're created by a single guy for over 20 years now.

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