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I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm actually quite disappointed that's the way you've approached us since I would have expected a personal mail rather than a public message in the forums.
With regards to the motives of our levels, we have 4: a babyroom, a garage, a street and a kitchen. All of these motives were decided before we knew of the existence of your game. The only one that wasn't sure until the end was the garage one, I don't think you have one, do you? And in any case we decide for that because we could play with tools and stuff to fill the tracks. The cars are all inspired in real cars and there is a wider variety than in TTR.
If you have any more concrete comments where you think we have gone too close, feel free to let me know what parts are you concerned about and I'll let you know where our inspiration comes from. For instance, the kitchen which you may think looks similar to yours. That's fair enough, yet we released a game called Toy Cars in 2010 (4 years ago!) where there were kitchen levels.
You can contact me at contact (at) eclipse-games (dot) net
Thanks,
I don't know if Playrise Digital uses Unity, but anyway I agree with romeo that we're both, at least, trying to paint the same kind of room, it's not that surprising that both rooms look somehow alike. But accusing us of cloning or copying is outrageous, IMO.
In the following link you can see a game that we released in 2010:
http://www.eclipse-games.net/ToyCars.html
It's called Toy Cars, its graphics are horrible (I did all of them) but it was what got us in Steam, and sold over 11K copies in XBLIG, which is a feat in itself, since XBLIG was such a hard platform.
That game had already a babyroom and a kitchen, both with quite a few objects that appear in Super Toy Cars (letter toy cubs, wooden cubes, toy trail, fruit, cutterly, etc). Those appear in TabelTop Racing too. But ours was released 2 years before the very first version of TTR! Also, our levels are more colourful than TTR's IMO, which differentiate them.
Of the 2 other ambiences only the garage is similar. The street tracks are not unique since there's lots of other games using that sort of tracks (ie Re-Volt) but they don't appear in TTR, so I guess we haven't 'copied' from them there... Anyway, the garage was a relatively obvious option for us since, after doing the street, we found that we needed places where lots of relatively small objects could be placed and made sense. So we had to select between the lounge and the garage, and the lounge seemed to lack some of these objects or they were too hard to do properly.
The idea of the garage was in no way inspired by TTR. I only recently realized they have a garage track. The little I played of TTR I didn't realize about it, probably because in my iPhone 4 all tracks look pretty much the same due to the same-y illumination. On the other hand, my parents live in a house with a garage, where they have lots of things laying around, which gave me the idea. Anyway, how many rooms with lots of little objects do you normally have in a house or flat?
You could argue the same about the cars. Even in our favour. I don't know when did Playrise decide to introduce the hot rod amongst their cars, it was only yesterday that I opened the game to see some of the game myself that I realized there were a bunch of new cars. Looking at the last update (March 2014) it may very well be after we released Super Toy Cars, which includes a hot rod car that looks 'suspiciously' similar to theirs (not that you can do a typical hot rod without it looking 'suspiciously' similar to other typical hot rods...).
Finally, as romeo says, we've taken in a lot of feedback from users, which are in no way suspicious of copying from TTR, but hey, who knows what they may think about that!
If you think I sound harsh, it's because I'm annoyed. I find that publicly accusing someone else of plagiarism (in a very clear but implicit way) without any prove of that is preposterous. It's unacceptable. Moreover when you're not doing something particularly original (this micromachines/re-volt/mario kart formula is not new and has been done before). Looking at similar games of the past (Micromachines saga, Re-volt, Hot Wheels, Mad Tracks, Things on Wheels,...) you can find lots of 'coincidences'. If I'm to borrow from someone, don't be concerned, I will do it from really successful games such as Mario Kart, Micromachines or Re-volt, not TTR.
I suppose the problem has arisen because Playrise is thinking on targetting Steam, Wii U, or any other console where we may go too (we're trying to get the game on consoles) and they may have found us and thought we look alike and thought no more than plagiarism. That's short-sighted to say the least, considering how many videogames have done similar things to us. Anyway, if instead of publicly accusing us of plagiarism, they had contacted me personally I would have been happy to explain all this and try to work with them to avoid releasing the game too close to each other. Right now there's a slim chance of me willing to work with these guys.
I find this accusation as stupid as if Burnout accused Need for Speed of having city levels that look like theirs (I know both are owned by EA I'm just making a point here).
I expect a public apology.
Thanks
In all of my years of gaming I have see some companies accusing each other of copying the same game but this has not gone anywhere since similarities will happend.
I hope this matter is put to bed since we are all here for gaming and nothing else.
Yeah I agree mate, as to why they would come and announce their game publicly, it would seem as a way to get free publicity for their game
Very low, playrise digital.. If you're gonna flat out accuse them of stealing your game, at least do it away from the public eye
And as the developer pointed out, the whole micro machines/mario kart formula has been done multiple times in the past.. I like how you say 'I suppose we should be flattered' ... lmao, it is really surprising to see this kind of stupidity from a game developer
TBH, I don't understand how someone can accuse you for using an obvious environment. In a house normally you have a sitting room (we considered that location and finally decided against it), bedrooms (we didn't find it easy to do 'realisticly' and with a table big enough to play), bathrooms (these we didn't find neither easy to do nor fit for the game), a kitchen (check), a playroom/toyroom if you have a house big enough (that's our babyroom which btw was also present in Micromachines games from the 90s) and a garage (check). On top of that we have outdoor environments and ours is very different from theirs (we have a street they have a picnic).
I could go on like that with the objects we used, etc. I think it's all very reasonable and if you start thinking on objects to put in these environments you'll find we have a lot of them. As said before, other games already have most of our objects.
BTW, we have other ideas for environments that we may try at some point. One of them is very original but it was complex to implement and we couldn't build tracks confortably there so that's why we decided against it.
I don't think they are trying to get more publicity or anything (I hope so). I think they just saw the announcement of the game for Wii U and thought we had stolen their idea. Instead of doing a bit of research and/or contacting us directly which would have given them info like the original Toy Cars which makes it pretty obvious we haven't cloned anything. Instead, they decided to go public, which is what annoys me the most.
Anyway, let's focus on games since, as you say, that's what we're here for.
Thanks!
Thanks for getting back to us. We did try to engage with you on Twitter and I left an email address too. Yes we do have a garage/car workshop too.
Cars: Our are all pastiches of real cars too....Camper Van, Beetle, Camaro, Jeep, etc etc. We have 17 Cars in the game...from an Ice Cream truck to an Easter Rabbit to a Bugatti-supercar lookalike....not really shy of variety ourselves, but granted you have some other cars too and I'm sure we're not the first game to feature similar car so lets not gripe on that.
Its really some of the circuti assets themselves. Very close on a number of things: Toy Room VS TTR Toy Room, the multicoloured bridges, jumbo crayon stacks, wooden alphabet blocks, wooden string train sets, tin robots, the spinninig tops, rubber ducks......
Garage VS TTR Car Workshop: Sandpaper bridges, corrugated cardboard bridges, virtually identical oil can design.....I'm not going say spanners and screwdriver because they are always going to look similar.
Anyway - it is what it is I don't expect you to change anything and I'm not surprised we think the same - we're developers too making products in the same space. No biggie. Was just surprised by how close in terms of the detail in the designs, palatte choices etc some of your assets were to ours. I would of course expect us to find similar themes of course.
@Romeo_4U - we don't use unity on TTR1 - all of our code is native, written from scratch - which it why it runs at 60hz even on an iPad 1st Gen or iPhone 4. All our assets are original or with granted artist approval.
@Doctor Mandrake - We're not accusing them of stealing anything - we're shocked by how similar the details of some of the assets to some of ours.
@Beerland - I've been a game developer for nearly 25 years - and you've probably played many of the games we have made. We're just doing it Indie route now - rather than inside a big mothership.
This is nothing to do with publicity. We don't need awareness on our game we have over 5 million downloads on iOS and Android. And we are also not launching on Steam or WiiU so there's no big dark plan here....just surprised.
And for the sake of peace, I DO make a public apology for shooting from the hip like that, but some assets shocked us. Anyway, we wish you luck with your future developments.
Playrise
Thanks for the apology. It's good to hear you're not accusing us of anything (the 'we're disappointed' and 'we should be flattered' parts in the post didn't sound very well). Anyway, let's forget about this.
Just a couple of things: we don't have crayon or spinning tops. The letter boxes you have are closer to the ones we had in Toy Cars (the 'original') than the ones in STC. Our robot is not tin, it does look more like plastic. Actually, yours looks a lot like the typical toy robot from the 90s like the one that appears in Re-volt (if I'm not mistaken). Our babyroom levels are inspired by Toy Story, BTW. The pink bear is a homage to that.
I don't know about the cardboard bridges (didn't know you had them), we only have them in the street levels. I don't think we have sandpaper anywhere either. The oil can was really similar, I must admit I was surprised myself too when I found yours (which was after reading this post and googling TTR). I can assure you our artist made it up completely. I guess both artists found the same cans when googling for them as reference.
Also, I think we've differentiated ourselves significantly from your game. We have a wide variety of tracks with a wide variety of colour palettes, assets, etc. We have day and night levels, warm and cold coloured levels, even levels where it rains. I think some of them are similar, but some others are very different. You just decided to focus on what was similar instead of the rest.
Finally, I'm not very good with Twitter, but I can assure you I haven't received any personal messages there. I'm not sure if I may have miss anything else though. Anyway, I'd encourage you to contact me through e-mail (it's in my first response) for anything else, particularly before writing something like that.
Good luck with TTR and other future endeavours,
Eclipse Games
"Good Gaming To All"