Hexoshi Milestone 1

A libre free-roaming game inspired by Metroid.

Dec 01, 2016

Project update 2 of 33

Of Translations and Clones

Even though it has only been two days, we have crossed the 25% mark! I can’t thank everyone enough for the amount of support we have received, whether that support comes in the form of a contribution to this campaign or just spreading the word. It means a lot.

I have also been in awe at another kind of contribution people have been offering in droves: translations. I have had at least four different people come forward expressing interest in helping to translate Hexoshi into another language. Because of this, I have added an answer to this question in the Questions section. In brief, Hexoshi uses gettext for translations, so to translate, simply create a translation file from "data/locale/hexoshi.pot".

But one thing I’m seeing come up a lot is the notion that Hexoshi is a clone of Super Metroid. I consider this to be inaccurate, so I would like to address it. I don’t think of Hexoshi as a clone of Super Metroid. Rather, I think of it as a new game inspired by Super Metroid, though it also has some inspiration from other sources.

To explain the difference, to me, a clone is a game that is designed specifically to be similar to another game, generally as similar to that other game as possible. Some examples of clones are Kapman, LTris, and Open Invaders. There is nothing wrong with making a clone, and there are a number of legitimate clones that I enjoy. However, this is not what we are doing with Hexoshi. We are not necessarily attempting to make Hexoshi similar to Super Metroid or any other title in the Metroid series. What we are attempting to do is make Hexoshi a great game in the same genre as Super Metroid (what I describe as "Metroid-like" and what some people describe as "Metroidvania"). Since Super Metroid got so many things right, that just happens to include doing many things the same way as Super Metroid.

In fact, almost every aspect of Hexoshi’s design was made not because Super Metroid did it that way, but because it simply is better than the alternatives. I don’t want to itemize all of these, but here are a few choice examples:

Of course, we are still in the early stages of Hexoshi’s design. As time goes on and Hexoshi is developed further, I suspect that it will start to look less and less like Super Metroid. That it looks so similar to Super Metroid now is just a testament to how many things that game did right.


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