Ask HN: Flash game devs, why don't you cover other people's games?
So, I was wasting my time yesterday and stumbled upon this little Flash game: http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/ . The author says it was made in just five days, but it's extremely well-balanced and hits the right emotion perfectly. This got me thinking: why don't Flash game developers make cover versions of other people's games that they adore, like musicians do with songs? Faithfully reproducing a good piece of work, capturing all the little details and maybe fixing the little shortcomings, sounds like the perfect workout for technical skills involved in game development.<p>------<p>For example, here's a short list of minor details about Canabalt that I'd fix if I were making a cover:<p>- When the character hits the void below a crane, it shouldn't stop him like a wall.<p>- When the character hits a crumbling building and falls, the building should continue crumbling instead of freeze.<p>- The jump button should be a little less twitchy, because right now it's too hard to reliably make the smallest possible jump.<p>- The randomly generated map shouldn't include jumps into windows below the current roof level, because judging from Internet comments, this rare situation reliably kills most players regardless of experience.<p>- The music shouldn't contain those long lulls every now and then.<p>- Remove the falling rocks from the bomb death animation, they look lousy.<p>Note that none of those are new features per se. New features are things that require creativity, and they sound more like this:<p>- Add a speed indicator.<p>- Replace bombs with hostile robots digging from below or falling from above, with identical mechanics.<p>- Add the option of jumping into a friendly gunship and escaping at the 5km, 10km, 15km marks etc.