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Portal 64 dev says “don’t be mad at Valve” for the project’s shutdown
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Duh, people are pissed at corporate greed that’s is at the core of all cease and desist orders on fan projects. Be it from Nintendo, MS, Sony or Valve and they aren’t stopping.
Indie devs need to stop wasting their time and efforts on fan projects that will never be played by the public because of these corporations shutting them down.
Instead of wasting 300+ hours making a fan project with nothing to show but the knowledge and potential lawsuit you’ve gained, how about putting all those hours into a personal project that is inspired by the games you want to copy instead.
You could make the next Portal, Team Fortress 2 or Hit and run. Just name it something different and stop making 1 to 1 reproductions of corporate property.
Making Portal for the N64 will give you much more exposure and media attention than making just another indie game statistically likely to fail and never get any attention. The guy made a name for himself with this project. Now when he creates an original game, it will get a lot more attention for being made by the Portal 64 developer and have a much better chance to succeed.
Right. Cause we see countless games being advertised as “from the one person that made the hit and run remake”. Or “from the developer of that cancelled Mario project”.
No, the project becomes known for the controversy of being shut down and people forget about it.
We need more indie games and publishing your own indie game is worth way more than popping out another fan wank that’s likely to get you a lawsuit.
You won't see a game advertised as "from that developer who made that thing", rather the dev's employers will see that through their job application.
There's a long history of modders being hired for things. CounterStrike was a mod to Half Life; Valve hired the modders to help make Source. Desert Combat was a mod to BattleField 1942; DICE hired the modders to help make BF2. Any coding project that someone participates in can be used to get a job.
Making indie games is only half the battle. Indie games often don't have the polish that comes from experienced coders - indie games tend to succeed on their ideas, in spite of a lack of technical expertise.
Back 4 Blood is got a lot of traction initially by saying it was a spiritual successor and made by the same people as Left 4 Dead (1). Of course, nobody plays it anymore because it turned out to be a meh game, but boy did people check it out!
CD Projekt RED also hired some mod developers.
Maybe not countless, but those absolutely exist. Retro City Rampage? That was originally "Grand Theftendo", a GTA 3 demake for the NES. Some of the AM2R (Metroid 2 remake shut down by Nintendo) developers are currently developing a Metroidvania after a very successful Kickstarter. Guess what the headlines about it focused on? Yup, the fact that they made AM2R.
It’s also a very good bullet point when interviewing to work for a game studio. Which is something that won’t be in headlines.
Actually we don't really need more indie games. The amount of games released is increasing 14000 games released in 2023 2000 more then 2022. Most of them are not good.
Those indie games are still better and more creative than the last 3 dozen of Ubisofts soulless open world clones.
I would take a gamble on an indie game over any fucking corporate live service scam.
If that name was "Gimmicky", that's all I took from it honestly. Using an N64 to learn to program games is one thing, but this obsession with making full fledged games on dead consoles is just bizarre. You're catering to a very specific niche. Plenty of people see "on N64" and immediately pass by it because we have no ability or reason to play that. Most of us would have to emulate it on another device anyways, entirely defeating the purpose.
Oh, and quick questio(don't cheat): what is the dev(s) name(s)? Cus I sure as hell haven't noticed that part at all in any of the convos. Just "that guy who made".
Making a game on the N64 today shows you can work within the limitations of much less powerful hardware. From a hiring perspective, it means you can say “I ported Portal to the N64” which says a lot more about your skill set than “ I made a 3D FPS with these neat twists”. It stands out.
I don’t know the name of the devs, but I would certainty pay more attention to their next project if I knew that it was made by the same people, which you can include in the description of your next game.
In Unity?
So, it took 15 minutes right?
Yes, because US game devs are so well known for their small install sizes. Are you serious?
I’m a little confused about what you mean. Is the implication that nobody (particularly employers) would care about being able to optimise a game because US games are so inefficient as demonstrated by their massive install sizes? That’s my guess but let me know if that’s incorrect. If my interpretation is correct then I don’t think that would make much of a difference. It’s not about needing to hire people who can do optimisation, it’s about the skill that went in to it and standing out from everybody else. If you were capable of learning that, on extremely old hardware with what I would assume requires a lot more manual work to do basic tasks compared to more modern game engines, imagine what they could do with all the extra tools!
It's not your time, let them use it how they want. Probably the fun for most is in the development.
Here's the thing, though. Just coding a game is a lot, before worrying about actually designing mechanics and managing meta-progression and writing even a basic story and world building, etc.
Making a fan project is real, concrete experience. It allows you to focus on one specific thing (actually writing the code and managing the codebase) without focusing on all those details. There's a reason most programming courses involve making simplistic clones of stuff that already exists. Many game development classes/tutorials do exactly the same, and work you through a clone of some other, pretty simple game.
That's what a fan project like this is, but it lets you focus on how a game larger in scope manages all the same problems instead of how to do it in brick breaker or whatever. It's valuable experience that's hard to replicate on a smaller project, and it's how some people learn best.
Others absolutely will do better starting small and just iteratively building up forever, but it's not the only way to learn. This approach is legitimate and for many people, better.
Now advertising it? Not a huge point of that. Unless you're actually asking people for feedback (how did they solve this problem?) and learning from example that way, you don't gain anything from telling people about it.
You get the motivation to continue; other people are looking forward to your progress and results.
You realize in this case the guy was using proprietary libraries from the N64 without Nintendo's consent in this mod? Valve would be absolutely insane not to dmca that mod. This guy kicked a hornets nest of lawyers by releasing this stuff even if his intentions were to just show the businesses what he can do. He knew what he was doing, he knew what would eventually happen, which is absolutely why he's telling people not to be mad at valve. Valve are just protecting their business in the same way Nintendo is protecting their intellectual property.
I’ll never forgive those Microsoftian bastards for shutting Halo Online down the very next day after it was released.
It's not greed, companies will literally lose their trademarks if they don't defend them
Why not just make a version of the game that is stripped of IP, then "someone" anonymously releases a conversation mod that adds in the copyrighted content?
But it makes even more sense to just do your own copycat version and actually sell it and make money off it.
A version of the game stripped of Portal IP would still need to be done using Nintendo's libraries, as the whole point of this project is that it worsk on the Nintendo 64.
You know what gets me? There are retro projects publishing for things like the Commodore 64 that don't see challenges like this.
It makes retro Nintendo hardware just that much more worthless in my view.
Nintendo would technically still be able to come after it, but at that point I doubt they'd care.
Yeah what I don't understand is why Valve are defending Nintendo's IP here. They didn't send a cease and desist because it was Portal, they sent it because it uses Nintendo's libraries.
Makes me wonder if there was some kind of legal settlement after the whole Dolphin emulator on Steam thing.
They're worried that by doing nothing they're implicitly endorsing the project and they don't want to give permission for their IP to infringe on Nintendo's.
Your whole point is undercut by the existence of Portal: Revolution, Portal: Mel, City of Heroes, etc. There's a way to do fan creations that's supported by the IP holders and ways not to do it.
I don't expect indie devs to be experts at the law but they can hardly be surprised if they go outside the boundaries set by the IP holders and then get a C&D.