Fan Vs Home Grown.

[ginanubismon]

After realizing the disasterious work of my first gaming outting and just now working on my second game to be release and placing more work into this.

In the beginning it was going to be simplily a fangame, another fangame with one of my favorite shows, Tiny Toons Adventure. It was going to have like this secret shocker that Babs'  father is a human (which is revealed in the first chapter) and there is a deeper secret about herself but as the script went on and I drew more and more of the characters while learning the basic uses of AGS the casual thought of how far from the orginal source matieral that Babs could be an orginal character and now one would notice the change, which at first pretty much upset me as I kind of thought the game cannot work without the character in it.

But, as I gotten tired getting good ideas shot down because it cannot work with the universe that Steven Speilberg (and to a degree Tex Avery along with Warner Brothers) had carefully created and in honest interest could come knocking on my door with a nice lawsuit (with bacon ) and possiblily sucking. Of course as I started to draw a concept character for the possible of another game it was then and there I kind of realized that perhaps while there are many, many good and solid fangames there is thrice(SP?) amount of orginal work out there. And after watching, studying and carefully listening to the making of featurette in the many, many anime DVDs I came to the conculsion that my game would be greater if it was made from scratch.

From my last experince with game making for King Of The Hill which was a major ***** to work on as there was little refernces and the possiblity of being sued and above all the game sucked I learned as I made orginal backgrounds and designs that it is a lot better. And a whole lot more fafilling too.

Getting down to my point here; I grew into making fangames because I was good with fanfiction and I love games and felt that the whole field of fanfiction is becoming a little too restricting as new and stupider rules are coming up by a lot of crazy people and the decline of good stories (in my opinion). But with the orginal production I learn that I got freedoms, and I can boldly hold my head up and proclaime that I work on this (production) all by myself which is of course a rarely something I can say in fanfiction.

Of course in final argument; the quaility of the product boils down to the effort put into it but I had gone over to the darkside of orginality, I could take every single cliche in the world and around it then force it into the single game with every single bland design ever it still my own creation which kind of makes me smile with pride.

What is your opinion of Fangames and orginal games?

[.Sklate.]

I have seen various fan-games being produced over the last few years, and many of them have shown close-to or even commercial quality graphics, music and even stories. Many people have then questioned the need to spend so much effort, time and even money on a fan-game when ...

1. You might get sued, have your project closed down near the end... etc.
2. The success of the original game might make people's expectations of your game a little high - making it harder to please the crowd. This is especially so if you do not have a storyline that compliments the original story created by the authors.

When you choose to make a fan-game, you're borrowing ideas, characters, storylines and at the same time, you bring a whole lot of expectations. A fan might not feel you have depicted Guybrush's quick-wittedness and comical character as well as Lucasarts has done, and by doing so, you would have killed the interest a fan might have in your fan-game.

With all that, I believe fan-games are a somewhat a stepping stone towards a bigger goal - which is to create your own original game. Why? Because having your own original game allows you to be involved in every character within it. You are able to define people, give people their characteristics and above all, decide on a storyline without having too much pressure/expectations on you.

Fan games are great practice. What makes it easier than to actually borrow ideas and characters? You are able to skip character design - which is usually a long process in any game-makers development.

It's original games for me But no grudges against fan-games! Lucasmaniac was a good one 

[The Inquisitive Stranger]

The only fan creations I actually enjoy are parodies and satires.

[cheeba]

There's a place for fan-games certainly, and like other have said they're a great stepping stone to bigger and brighter things, but I tend to find them more restrictive than anything. I'd outlined a couple of fangame ideas for my first AGS game, but ended up working on something entirely original instead.

[Afflict]

I laways prefeer home grown to fan games. Fan games lack substance in most cases and well lets just say i wanted to do a couple then decided against it, will more than likely do them sometime I just preffer my own. Maybe upload scripts of games to forum and maybe someone will make it LoL

[ShadeJackrabbit]

I'm working on a fan game, (not announcing in case legal action is taken) and I think fan games are good as long as it isn't an overdone series. Example: Mario, Sonic, Megaman.

[cheeba]

Yeah, I have a couple of ideas that may see the light of day for fan games in the future, but only as part of a dedicated team (I doubt I'd ever be able to do them justice on my own). I've got a possible three in the ideas stage (The Dawn game set in the Buffyverse being one of them, but not the most likely to be made), with the other two currently vying for 'next active project' status alongside the ongoing development of my other game.

[Nikolas]

I don't enjoy fan games, as it shows that there is a lack of 'original' creativity in them, meaning that the 1% that is called talent in any form of art or creative form of doing anything was taken from somebody else.

I can't see the reson of making a Simpons fan game. Why not come up with a better way to parody America?

Why do you have to have refference to MI? Pirates does not mean MI! It can mean very different things!

Why the heck (I'm so against that) you HAVE to make **IX (the ninth sequence to a very popular game)? Why can't you come up with a ingeinous way to steal fairy tales on your own, and hve to use the name King GRaham instead?

etc...

Against... I'm against.

[ShadeJackrabbit]

As I said, certain games are... overdone. But what if something is missing from the story? Something that just HAS to be added. I'm not talking about giving Maniac Mansion a new character, I'm referring to games like The Journeyman Project, or Myst. Things that are already so "out-there" that you can do a lot of stuff with. I think a fan game has a major advantage:
No character introductions neccessary.
They can help, but you don't need to spend time on it. I think there is a lot of pre judgements going around about fan games becuase of all the really bad mario fan games.

[.Sklate.]

I think one of the main reasons why fan games are so appealing to aspiring developers, is that the characters in the games already have characteristics/attrubutes/behaviours that most people would be familiar with. Same thing goes for places/locations.

I think coming up with a good set of characters and their personalities is vital to an adventure game. Fan-games saves you time on that.