This topic is all about clones of other known proprietary games.
I define “clone” as a faithful re-implementation of an existing game with the goal to come very close or even near-identical to the original game, especially in terms of gameplay and the general theme. As the media can rarely be legally duplicated, they can of course be different. The main difference will be that the clone is a free software and/or community project.
It is undeniable that a number of free software games are clones. Not all of them, mind you, but they do exist.
What is your opinion on clones? Do clones matter? If a game is cloned, does it need to be faithful or are deviations OK? Are they even acceptable? Are there games which deserve to be clones more than other games? Or are clones just a waste of time? What are your other thoughs on clones?
In my opinion, clones of existing proprietary games are first, and foremost, not a bad thing per se. If you understand free software as part of a movement (which it undenyably is), then a clone is simply the attempt “free” a game by giving it to the community. The goal of the free software movement is not primarily to produce original software, but to make sure that the software which does exists is free.
Of course, that is not to say original games have no place in the free software world, but I want to make a case that clones do matter.
Another question is how religiously a game should be cloned. Well, it depends. Most games have flaws, even serious flaws. Other games have pointless and frustrating technical restrictions, like the fact that a Minecraft world has only a height of 256 blocks.
In my opinion, a good clone should recognize when the original game does something really stupid, and simply refuse to clone that.
In short, clone the good things, ignore the bad things. And even a faithful clone should not replicate obvious flaws and technical restrictions.
Another big topic is perhaps compability with the original. I am very split on this issue and it probably depends a lot on the game. But for complex games, savegame compability, or compability with other files can make you totally crazy, and its a crazy amount of work. By throwing out compability as a goal from the start, it can save a good amount of work.
When a clone is “finished”, you have the opportunity to build additional features (even gameplay) on top of that (if you still have time and motivation), and could even push the original game into irrelevance.
This is exactly what has happened with OpenTTD and is now one of the most successful FOSS games.
One very important thing which every free clone should have is that it must be able to completely stand on its own, it must not contain proprietary files itself (obviously), but also must not depend on the original game in any way. The help and game texts should always be written in a way so they could be understood by someone who never even heard of the original game. The name should also be unique and not make it seem that it is in any way connected to the original game.
I am obviously very biased here, as I have worked on a Minecraft clone for quite a bit of my time so far.
There are many other things about clones to say, but I stop at this point. So what do you think?