When Your Dream Game Already Exists
Modern PC gaming has reached a wild point. If you can imagine a game, there is a good chance something similar is already on Steam, itch, or sitting in someone’s GitHub repo. That is awesome as a player, but it can feel brutal if you are an indie developer trying to make your first mark.
That is exactly what happened to an indie dev who goes by the name Sbibble. After months of work in the Godot engine, he suddenly discovered a game on Steam that looked a lot like his own idea. The panic hit hard. Had he just spent all that time making a clone without knowing it?
Instead of quietly scrapping the project, he went to the r/IndieDev subreddit and posted a thread titled, The game I have been working on for months is exactly the same as a game I just discovered today. What do I do?
His concept was clear. It was a top down action game built in Godot, with gameplay somewhat like Enter the Gungeon and a spell system inspired by Noita. Nothing wildly original on paper, but with enough of a twist that it felt fresh to him. Until he found Gunforged.
Gunforged is another indie title that Steam itself compares directly to Noita and Enter the Gungeon on its store page. To Sbibble, it looked remarkably similar to the project he had been quietly building. His fear was simple and very real for new devs. What if people just call it a ripoff?
The Plot Twist. The Other Dev Shows Up
This is where the story gets surprisingly wholesome. The creator of Gunforged, a developer named Firebelley, actually saw the Reddit thread and decided to respond.
Instead of being defensive or territorial, Firebelley went the exact opposite direction and told Sbibble not to give up. His response was basically the indie dev version of a buff.
He told Sbibble that there was plenty of room to do Gunforged better than he did, especially by focusing on something unique. Even just improving Gunforged’s weak spots and fixing its rough edges could be enough to make Sbibble’s game stand out and sell some copies.
That comment did two important things. First, it reassured a new developer who was close to throwing away their whole project. Second, it highlighted a truth about game design that is easy to forget if you are only looking at store pages and trailers.
Most games are not born from pure originality. They are built on ideas that came before. Genres exist for a reason. Roguelikes, deck builders, extraction shooters, survival crafting games. All of them are huge piles of shared mechanics and expectations.
The difference between a ripoff and an inspired game usually is not in the basic pitch. It is in the details. Do you copy the art, characters, logos and visual style? Or do you take core mechanics and remix them into something you can honestly call your own?
When copying really does cross the line, it is obvious. The article points to Sony’s action against the game Light of Motriam, which looked extremely close to the Horizon series both visually and mechanically. That kind of situation is very different from two devs both making bullet hell dungeon crawlers with spell systems.
Iteration Is How Games Evolve
What makes this story worth sharing with the wider PC gaming audience is how clearly it shows the iterative nature of game development.
- Enter the Gungeon itself is built on ideas from earlier roguelikes and twin stick shooters.
- Noita took classic side scrolling action and pushed its physics and spell simulation way further than usual.
- Gunforged then took inspiration from those games and did its own thing.
- Now Sbibble is taking inspiration from all of them and trying to combine them in his own way inside Godot.
None of these games popped out of a vacuum. And that is not a weakness of the medium. It is how it grows. Each new game learns from the last wave, fixes some pain points, adds a twist, and maybe discovers one new trick that will be copied again later.
In his follow up, Sbibble posted a YouTube video showing early footage of his project, which currently has the working title Gremnors Quest. He also talked more about how surprising the response to his Reddit post has been and how much Firebelley’s encouragement helped.
At the same time, he stays honest. The game is still very early in development and might never be finished. He makes it clear that updates or bad news like a cancellation will all go through his YouTube channel so people are not left guessing.
That mix of ambition and transparency is something more indie devs are adopting, especially in the PC space. Early prototypes hit YouTube or Steam wishlists. Communities form around very rough builds. Feedback shapes balance, pacing and even core systems long before release.
For players, it is a good reminder that the Steam page you see is usually just the surface. Behind each indie icon is a long trail of doubts, comparisons and course corrections. A game that looks familiar on the outside can still feel completely different once you get your hands on it.
For aspiring devs, the lesson is simple. You will almost never be the first person to combine mechanic A with mechanic B. That does not matter. What matters is how well you execute, what problems you solve and whether you bring enough personality and polish to make players care.
In other words, the real fight is not against other similar games. It is against your own urge to quit the moment you realize someone else shipped something in the same space. Finishing and improving is the real power move.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/an-indie-dev-worried-about-being-seen-as-a-ripoff-after-discovering-a-game-similar-to-the-one-they-were-making-but-then-the-original-dev-responded-dont-be-discouraged/
