So those of you that read along on my humble little blog know – I haved toyed around with XNA off and on for a bit now – and I actually finished a rough cut of a fully functional game. Granted it wasn’t much to play with but truth be told my intent was to use it to learn, expand it from a single solitaire game to a group of solitaire games (like a selection fo 10 or so), with a ‘career stat’ type tracking for each of the game types. So you would be able to look at things like your fastest completion time, your completion percentage, your wins versus losses, and who knows what else. Here and there over the past few weeks or so I did completely rework alot of the guts of the game to make it easier to add these to be built various solitaire game types, reviewed rules of a bunch of common solitaire game types, and I completely reworked the user interface to allow mouse, or xbox controller to navigate the cards, but still had quite a bit to go.
So I was looking over my code for the game, deciding if I wanted to pick up some game coding tonight or if I wanted to actually play some games, and playing games won. Since I haven’t really been on my xbox for long in the last few days I decided to browse the marketplace – the arcades and the community games….and what did I find? Indirian Solitaire. That’s right folks it just so happens the game I was planning to build and release was just put on the marketplace today. Don’t get me wrong I am not saying they stole my code – or my idea, let’s be honest a solitaire game isn’t exactly ground breaking – but on the flip side, can I really continue to develop and release a game with pretty much the same features that this game provides? The only thing that I was originally planning to include that they don’t have in their game was those career stats I mentioned. It’s not the same as working on something like a RPG, or a platformer, which even if you have a similar character or story – there are varients to make it unique on its own – a grouping of card games is a grouping of card games, and even if i selected 10 different solitaire types, it just seems to cross or border on that to much of the same thing line.
So now comes the time where I decide where to go next. Do I:
- Continue to develop the game as I originally intended if for nothing else to extend my knowledge, most likely not complete the entire process of submitting it as a full XNA game for the marketplace
- Morph it into a new idea – one of which Trapper has discussed with me somewhat related to a solitaire setup
- Scrap it and just hope that I can forge and execute my next idea before someone else gets the jump on me again?
In reality I had a feeling it was bound to happen as I was just getting my feet wet in game development at all and as stated above it wasn’t some completely new ground breaking IP that I came up with on my own destined to rise to the top of the community games world, but it still was a bit of a saddening blow to see exactly what I seriously considering releasing as an XNA game show up on the marketplace – and moments before I was planning on spending some time on that very project.
I don’t think a similar game is a particularly strong reason to stop developing your game. There’s room in the Marketplace for multiple games in the same genre, plus you have an advantage as you now know what is already out there and can make your game better or different to suit.
I’ve just started playing with XNA and I haven’t got to the point of coding up a whole game yet, but a game similar to one of my ideas already exists.
I want to make a roguelike for Xbox, but there already exists a roguelike made in XNA called Heroic Adventure! (HA!). It’s not 360-compatible yet, but the developer tells me he’s working on it.
I still plan to make my own roguelike, I just now can make a more informed decision about how to make my own game stand apart from HA!.
Don’t think you missed the boat just because someone else had your idea, just make sure your idea is different (and better) than theirs.
Could you combine option 1 & 2? Finish the solitaire game and add to it the other morphed idea? I know that would be more work but it would give your game more features.