Two Game Developers One Premise

Patrick Klepek has this fascinating article covering two developers who come to find they’re working on almost the same premise for a game:

Perception, where you play a blind person who taps a cane to see around them, was revealed last week. Soon, an email went around indie studio Tiny Bull. “Panic started to spread among the team,” said CEO Matteo Lana. Why? Tiny Bull had been making Blind, a game with the same premise, for more than a year.

It all started when a Tiny Bull programmer was surfing new Kickstarter projects and came across the one for Perception.

“He sent me a message saying ‘Hey, this game looks a bit like our game.’” said Lana. “And I went ‘No, that is our game.’ It was a bit hard. It was quite a blow at the time.”

This kind of thing happens all the time, a few years ago it was the “year of the bow” when every game coming out seemed to feature bows and arrows regardless of the setting. Even Battlefield 3 added a crossbow. Is this the year of indie games with a visual aesthetic that can’t be played by people who are actually blind? Fortunately there are other developers who make games where all the gameplay is aural.