This game is stunning. It’s rare that I suggest playing a game for the visuals. In fact, I think I’ll let that stand as my general recommendation when it comes to The Plucky Squire.
But take away those visuals, and you’re left with an easy and incredibly linear game. And it’s a shame, because The Plucky Squire has so much potential in its mechanics. But it never really offers the player any freedom to use them.
Story
The Plucky Squire is the story of Jot. Jot lives in a storybook world where he stops the schemes of the evil wizard Humgrump, with help from his two friends and the wise wizard Moonbeard. It’s implied that this has happened many times before, but this time, Humgrump blasts Jot with magic that kicks him out the story. For most of the game, you’ll be jumping in and out between the between the book and the “real world” of a child’s work desk.
This meta aspect of “Story within a story” isn’t really examined too much ( except for it possibly causing a time paradox). Again, this is fine. It’s a minor element, and it doesn’t bother me.
What does annoy me is how simple the story is. Ostensibly it’s a tale about creativity and imagination, but it really only pays lip service to that concept. Jot is a writer, and his sword is a pen nib. Okay, that’s cool, but where is that mechanically?
There was a lot of space to foreshadow the game’s one big surprise (the villain was once an artist too!), but the developers chose not to do any forehsadowing. In addition, the “one big twist” isn’t relevant to the story.
Side Note: I don’t think that the Plucky Squire was trying to make Humgrump relatable. But I found him kinda relatable after the game reveals that he used to just be a bad poet. I’m an amateur artist who is quite bad at art, and struggles to enjoy it. I’m cognizant of my own lack of improvement. I put most of my energy into the job that pays me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from The Plucky Squire’s story. If I don’t improve my art, I’ll become an evil wizard?
There’s also a real disconnect between the game’s written message—that of a love letter to creativity and imagination—and how linear the actual gameplay is.
Gameplay
Ostensibly, The Plucky Squire is a puzzle platformer. Let’s start with the platforming. This game’s primary conceit is the ability to jump between a 2d top-down book, and a 3d “real world.” Both worlds control pretty much the same, outside of the third dimension. There’s also a very small number of side scrolling sections. There’s combat, but it’s so laughably easy that it mostly just serves to break up the puzzles
But the puzzles. Oh, the puzzles.
The puzzles are incredibly dull.
The Plucky Squire introduces a large number of mechanics that could have been used as part of a larger scale system of puzzles. And then it just… doesn’t use them. While you’re given a variety of abilities, they really just function as keys.
For example: the game gives you the ability to stop objects in the scene. But you only use it in a few specific areas to stop specific objects. The game gives you the ability to tilt the book. But tilting only pushes around one or two things, and it pushes them on hard coded rails.
This path unlocks with the stop time key. This other path unlocks with the bomb key. Another path unlocks with the tilt key.
Okay, this mini-game was actually decent.
The mini-games don’t really help. They’re amusing, but they’re also short, and it’s hard to see how Punch Out, or Puzzle Bobble really sell the themes of the characters you’re playing as.
And the stealth sections with the bugs just kind of suck. They are the only part of the game where I struggled at all, and it’s mostly due to weird patterns, and strange pathing and sight lines.
But speaking of bugs…
Bugs
The game is buggy. It’s less buggy now that it’s been 3 weeks since release. But a non-zero portion of my playtime was spent trying to fix a soft lock in the final chapter of the game where my characters got stuck looking at a bench. Sure, it got fixed, but it got fixed by another Steam user, not the devs.
There was also apparently a fairly big bug that would permanently lock up the game if you used two mechanics in a non-intended way. Again, this goes back to the whole “abilities act as keys to specific doors” thing.
I am pretty lenient on bugs and glitches most of the time, but there was point where it looked like I had wasted 6 hours of my life.
I was pretty grumpy.
In Retrospect
Okay, so looking back, I finished The Plucky Squire about 3 weeks ago. Then I got involved in some other stuff, and never finished this write up. This last weekend, and I did a game jam, and I got a pretty solid reminder of the fact that 1. Making games is hard and 2. Getting players to do what you want is hard.
With that lens, I don’t think the Plucky Squire set out to be patronizing to its players. I do think though that the game was likely rushed in development.
There are a bunch of small hints that point to rushed development. For me, the biggest hint is how Jot’s friends just don’t have character arcs. They’re foisted into the game, given a fear, given one screen of character development an hour later to get rid of said fear, and a mini-game section in the final boss.
And looking through this lens of rushed development, it makes a lot more sense as to why a set of potentially fascinating mechanics involving clever interactions are dumbed down to a set of linear puzzles.
I could be wrong on this, but the scale of the art in the game to me screams “over ambition” more than it does “dumbed down for kids.” You don’t make something this beautiful but mechanically and thematically hollow on purpose. You make it because you ran out of time.
Conclusion
The Plucky Squire is a 10/10 for art, and a 6/10 for story and gameplay. What does that make it over all? I don’t know. It’s too visually impressive to be a seven, but it’s frankly not invigorating enough in either mechanics or narrative to elevate it to an eight.
Maybe the truth is that numbers are a bad way to assess art. That said, this piece of art cost me $30 bucks. If it had been $20 or $15, I might be more lenient.
As it is, I’d advise anyone curious about the game to wait for a sale and pick it up when it’s a bit cheaper. It’s worth seeing. It’s just not worth playing.
I did Ludum Dare again! Ludum Dare 56 to be exact. The Big Battle for Tiny Mouse City was my entry, and I got it “finished” about an hour before the cutoff time.
Click above to play it!
It’s a short little RPG that takes less then 30 minutes to complete. You run around gathering party members, and grabbing weapons to fight the final boss. If I’m being honest, there’s not much here that hasn’t been done in a RPG before, and I’m sure another game has done the “Party of a dozen characters” gimmick before as well.
This writeup covers my thoughts on the experience, where things went well, where they didn’t, and what I’d do differently if I could.
This was my first time doing a game jam solo. As a result, I decided to use RPG Maker MV. The RPG Maker “engine” is a weird one. It’s been used to develop some cult classics, including To The Moon, and Fear & Hunger. It’s also mostly javascript, the editor crashes more than anyone could want, and I have a hard time trying to get it to do anything complex.
For a game jam, though, it offered huge advantages. It comes with a complete structure for making a classic RPG, has placeholder art and assets, and there are a large number of community-developed plugins. It also made it very easy to create a web-hostable build.
So with engine decided, and the theme of “Tiny Creatures,” I decided I wanted to do a classic RPG. The twist was that instead of leveling up, you just get a massive party of characters. In my mind, this was gonna be like 20 characters in a party. After a reality check on the level of effort per party member, I cut it down to 12.
My loop was going to be simple: run around and talk to people to add them to your party, find weapons and equip them, and then fight through a few enemies on a quest to get to the final boss.
So around 12:00 on Saturday, this was my design document.
This was it. This was the entire design.
The Implementation
And here’s the finished product. As you can see, it’s actually pretty similar. My initial idea was that the game would have two “halves”, separated by a mid-boss, and then a final boss at the end. In between, the player would recruit new members into their party, pick up weapons, and fight a few trash mobs.
That said, quite a few things changed between the initial idea, my incredible design document, and the final game.
The first big thing was the starting room, or Tutorial Room.
After I continually failed to equip weapons when playtesting, I realized that players would also mess it up. This is important, because it is impossible for any character to deal damage without a weapon equipped. So I made a room that forces the player to find a sword and equip the sword to leave it. This opening has the subtlety and grace of truck nuts, but from the comments I’ve seen on the game, I think it worked.
It also has a little bit of info about where the player can find a special party member. It’s a small clue, but hopefully it helped someone.
A fight, followed by a friend.
Once the player exits the room, they’re immediately greeted with a path that leads to an enemy encounter. After the enemy encounter, they reach a NPC that joins their party. Again, mallet over the head. But given the short length of the game, I wanted players to immediately understand the recruitment mechanic, since all but one of the mouse characters on the map will join the player once talked to.
Side Note: Initially the friendly mouse next to the fight was actually off to the side, but a friend of mine walked by them in play-testing, so I decided to force the player to interact with them.
One of the big things I really want to talk about is the tan path.
I added the path in passing, but it ended up being perfect. The path leads to 3 things: two special mice, the Healer and Alchemist, and the game’s mid and final bosses. The path grounded the game, which otherwise was just a bunch of square green rooms. If the player follows it down a route they haven’t gone, they will find something new.
Subtlety, my name is not.
That said, I wanted the player to explore a bit, so there’s a bunch of weapon chests and recruitable NPC’s just off the path. There are also a few very direct instructions to look for things off the path, and places where the player can see something off the path from further away. The most obvious was the sign above.
Still, it does bring me to my biggest failure in the game: the mid boss.
Conceptually, I wanted to have a big mean rat that gives a speech in the middle of the town, with their acolytes flocking around. I wanted a whole little cutscene, and build up, to keep the player interested.
Oh mid boss, I failed you. I failed you so hard.
But I didn’t get the time. Even his battle and world sprite are pretty last minute.
This is a problem. From a player retention standpoint, the mid boss is the first “big” exciting thing the player sees after the start the game. It should be a moment that encourages them to keep playing. But as it stands, it’s pretty dull. There aren’t really any “Big” moments after him, just a few more fights, and some treasure.
So what should have been a “Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next” moment, turned into a “I’ve seen enough, time to rate the game” moment.
That said, I’m much more pleased with the final boss.
Here comes the boy.
Catmagedon has their own theme music. They have their own big scary overworld sprite. They have a little tiny cutscene before the fight, and I pumped their damage high enough that they actually feel scary to fight.
I’m actually on the fence about their battle sprite. I think I needed to remove the battleback, and simplify it a bit, because like… yeah, that don’t look like no cat.
They’re probably the high point of the game, and even with the wonky menu, and weird interactions, I think they probably felt fun.
Lessons Learned
One thing I learned from this experience is why RPG’s don’t usually have a party over 4: it makes the game quite a slog. I actually cut all enemy HP by about 20% late on Sunday because fights were taking too long. I didn’t want people to quit out of boredom. It’s a fun gimmick, but I don’t think it’s a good way to model a mob of characters.
The second thing was that I am always biting off more than I can chew. I thought I could do a single map RPG with no leveling up in 3 days. I still had to cut a player character, custom tile maps, face plates for dialogue, most of the mid boss, and 2 enemy types to finish on time.
It was also a good reminder that players don’t know anything you don’t tell them. I occasionally grouse about over tutorialization, but it’s necessary.
It’s also an interesting opportunity to look back at my previous entry and ask if I’ve used any of those lessons learned. I think the answer is yes. I was much more consistent about tutorials, and beating the player over the head with mechanics.
What would I do differently?
I should have forced the player to save before the final boss, in case they died. I also wish I’d “smoothed” the map design a bit more. Specifically, I wish I had pulled parts of the map in closer together. Here’s an example.
Smoothed design, where I cut down the total space significantly.
Unsmoothed design, it’s a significantly longer walk off the beaten path to find those chests.
I’ve already talked about the mid boss at length, but I think I know how I’d fix him now. While I’m happy with most of the art, I wish I’d done a second pass on the player sprite to fix its left/right direction, and its ears.
Conclusion
For someone who spends so much time on unfinished projects that never see the light of day, it’s nice to actually complete something for once, even in an imperfect form. I hope people have some fun with it.
I’m not sure that I’ll return to the game in any large scale, but I may make a “directors cut” version with some fixes and quality of life changes after voting finishes for games.
That said, we’ve had 3 weeks of “not game reviews” on the blog. After this last post, it’s time to return to your regularly scheduled blog posts: those of games and game reviews.
Thanks for reading and thanks to anyone who played my little game.
Duskmourn is here! I was trying to think of something witty to say about the set, but I don’t really have any insights on its implementation of modern horror.
I was going to borrow some copy from the Wizards site, but the site was mostly about how I would have a “more thrilling experience” by pre-ordering boxes of collector boosters, something I decided to skip.
I’m sure it would be a thrilling and horrible experience to look at my bank account afterward, but that’s not the sort of horror I’m looking for.
Instead, let’s talk about some Sealed! Here’s what I ended up building.
View the list on Aetherhub. As a brief note, I’ve included only rares and cards in my colors in the sideboard, but there were in fact more cards than this.
While the rest of the pool was decent, it didn’t offer much in the way of a definitive direction. My two pretty mythic creatures (Niko, Light of Hope and The Wandering Rescuer) did give me direction, though!
As a result, I ended up with a pretty straight forward Blue/White aggro list.
Compared to my last pool, this one was far stronger and offered a definite direction to play.
So how did it actually do?
Better than last time! Still not great. But better!
Match 1 was a set of games against Red/Blue control that I was able just roll over in two quick games. Possessed Goat put in a lot of work, and they were never able to drop a big enough creature to slow my roll of tiny dudes and pump effects.
Match 2 was another 2-0, but a much harder fought one. They were running a Red/Green/Blue delirium deck. Game 1 was a bit of a brawl, but Niko and The Rescuer managed to turn things for me. Game 2 was closer, with them dropping a few Patchwork Beasties, but not managing to get the delirium up quite in time. This allowed me to finally sneak a board in, and pump the goat again for lethal.
And then we get to Match 3.
It might as well be a running bit at this point.
For the first time in the night I experienced actual horror: my round 3 opponent was going to be my friend. Again. He was running blue/black control with splashed red for a few extra creatures.
And just like last time, it did not go well for me. While I managed to take game 1 off of Niko and The Rescuer showing up, game 2 he managed to drop his Unholy Annex/Ritual Chamber for a 6/6 flying demon, after removing some of my early threats. A lack of hard removal combined with being pinged for two each turn while he healed up two meant that I did not last long.
It was finally time for game three.
It was not technically a stomp. I had him down to 4 life. But then Unholy Annex/Ritual Chamber came out again, and even though I removed the 6/6 demon, he just sacked the Annex with Boilerbilges Ripper. He then proceeded to drop Grievous Wound, and turn my “potential possible comeback” life total of 20 into 7 in one turn.
Is there a moral to this story? Yes. Next time he commits to a three color control list, I’m not going to suggest he cuts aggro-fliers and adds the midsize bodies.
Is there a better moral? Well, honestly, I think I probably should have side-boarded in a few more of my slightly cheaper cards after game 2 for game 3.
But overall, how did it go?
Some final thoughts
I was generally excited for Bloomburrow, and I’m looking forward to playing Duskmourn. I’m not a huge fan of the theme, and there aren’t really any cards I want in the set, but it set itself apart mechanically. Rooms feel fantastic, which makes it a shame that we likely won’t see them again for a while after this. Manifest Dread can also be quite exciting.
As a set, I don’t really have any big thoughts or worries, frankly. Historic Brawl is my primary format. I’m sure we’ll have things that shake it up, but it doesn’t look like there’s a Nadu 2.0 just yet.
Some Friends’ Decks
As is tradition, here are the decks of my friends at the event, and their records.
This belonged to the friend who kicked my butt. Someday we won’t get paired in round 3, and I won’t get salty, but that was not today. They cruised to a 3-0 overall, only dropping 1 game.
Finally, we’ve got my other friend. They ended up going 1-1-1 off their midrange Red/Green list.
Disclaimer: This post uses real names, and talks about an ongoing conflict. If after reading it, you feel strongly that one side or the other is in the right here, I urge you to channel that feeling into support for that side’s project. Do not harass or make personal attacks against anyone.
Four years ago at PAX East, I played a demo for a game called Sento Fighter. It was a match 3, 1v1 dueling game with a marble selection system, designed by Brother Ming. It was under contract to be published by Penguin & Panda Games. Due to Penguin & Panda’s mismanagement of other projects, it would never go to production.
Just under a year ago, at PAX East, I demoed a game called Power Well. It was a match 3, 1v1 dueling with a marble selection system, being developed by Red Planet Games. Red Planet Games was clear with me that it was inspired by Sento Fighter, and initially, right after PAX, Ming was positive about the game.
This past Sunday, the CEO of Red Planet Games, Martin Myles, put up an 8,000 word post accusing Ming of extortion, and calling him a bully. Ming responded by calling Myles a hack who refused to credit him and announcing that he had acquired the rights back to Sento Fighter, and would be publishing it as Re;MATCH. Ming also included a 12-item list of shared mechanics between the games.
So what on Earth happened, and how did we get here?
In the last few days, what began as a private disagreement between Brother Ming (designer of Sento Fighter), and Myles Martin (CEO of Red Plant Games) about whether Brother Ming should be credited as a game designer on Red Planet’s game Power Well, has turned into a full on public feud. This writeup is intended to lay out a timeline for what led to these events, and give some additional context.
Since I don’t want it to get buried, here’s my personal opinion:
1. Brother Ming deserves designer credit for Power Well.
2. Nobody here has publicly broken any laws or committed any crimes. Even if Red Planet Games publishes Power Well and doesn’t credit Brother Ming, they won’t have committed a crime.
3. Taking all participants at their word, I view this mess as more the result of incredibly unfortunate miscommunication and questionable legal ownership of the design than anything else. I’d like to believe no one here set out to rip someone else off without credit, even if this probably paints me as quite foolish.
This is my opinion as of 9/25/24, and it’s quite possible it changes if more information comes out.
Timeline
It’s 2018. Brother Ming begins prototyping a game called Orb Strikers. The rights to Orb Strikers will later be licensed to Jason Moughon for $10,000 and renamed to Sento Fighter.
Jason Moughon is the CEO of publisher Penguin and Panda, and later Big Kid Games. Penguin and Panda successfully funded Kickstarter campaigns for several games, notably Onimaru. Onimaru was expected to deliver in 2019.
P&P failed to fulfill this campaign in a timely manner. There is mixed opinion on Jason Moughan in the board game community. Many backers for projects he ran feel that they have been scammed. They point at his behavior of setting up Big Kid Games after P&P acquired a poor reputation. Other individuals feel that Jason ended up in over his head, and failed to correctly manage the costs of production and delivery, not that he set out to scam people.
But in 2020 Jason still has his reputation intact. Penguin and Panda is demoing Sento Fighter at multiple game conventions, including PAX East and PAX South. Myles plays it, and really enjoys it. He’s excited to see the final product.
Things continue to get worse for Penguin and Panda throughout 2021. They continue to fail to fulfill Onimaru, and some of their distribution partners begin to disavow them, as can be seen here in an archived post from Japanime Games.
As a result, Sento Fighter is never crowdfunded or produced, and exists purely as a Board Game Geek page, a mailing list sign up page, a private Tabletop Simulator Mod, a few photos from conventions, a Penny Arcade post and a single two hour liveplay from collective content group Love Thy Nerd.
Over the next few years, Brother Ming attempts to buy back the rights to Sento Fighter so he can continue development and publish the game, but is rebuffed by Jason.
In 2023, Myles Martin is chatting with his brother, and the two end up discussing Sento Fighter, and wondering what happened to it. After failing to find any info, they decide to attempt to recreate the game. They name their group Red Planet Games.
In January of 2024, the Red Planet Games team feels they have a strong game to demo. They end up getting a booth at PAX East. Brother Ming first learns about Power Well through direct messages from players at PAX East, and is immediately worried that the game is somehow connected to Jason Moughan. This suspicion is largely irrelevant to the rest of the events that follow, except that it does serve to illustrate the miscommunication that will occur between Myles and Ming.
They connect over Discord, and then over the next several months, they will continue to sporadically message, and even get dinner. Unfortunately, while this could have served to defuse the situation, they mostly piss each other off. Below are a few examples.
Ming comes in initially somewhat suspicious of Jason being involved, as Jason has a history of trying to start new companies to dodge his bad reputation. It’s not helped by the fact that Myles has made really nice prototypes. Miscommunication #1
Ming tweets about the game to Jerry Holkins, AKA Tycho Brahe, writer for Penny Arcade and founder of PAX. Myles takes this as a sort of attempted flex on him and Red Planet, as opposed to the “Yo, this shit is cool” that it is. Miscommunication #2
Ming asks Myles to consider hiring the original Sento Fighter artist to do some of the artwork. Myles has a family member doing the art, and so instead takes this request as an insult. Miscommunication #3
Ming makes suggestions about the ethnicities of the characters. Myles feels that Ming is trying to tell him how to make his game. Ming feels that Myles is taking his own work, and removing his impact on it. There’s a larger discussion here that I’m not qualified to comment on, but I will note that this sort of discussion often comes up between designers and publishers during contract negotiation. Miscommunication #4
Ming and Myles get dinner to try to sort of calm things down. While there are no “Chat logs” for dinner, Myles comes away from the experience feeling personally attacked. Miscommunication #5!
Ming notes that Jason might be litigious. Myles decides he needs to make sure his project is above board legally, and will later hire lawyers for advice. This single moment is the match that will ultimately torch any hope of this being resolved amicably.
This all continues to just simmer, right until July 5th where things finally kick off.
But first….
A Brief Note on Legal Matters within the Board Game Industry
I’m not a lawyer. This is not discussing what the law is when it comes to board games, but the current state of how the law seems to actually work here in September of 2024, in the United States. At least in regards to small and medium size board game publishers and designers.
There are a lot of open and expensive questions about the nature of things like copyright, patents, and just the general mess that is intellectual property when it comes to board games. However, unlike the video game industry, nobody in board games has any money. So, nobody sues each other, because they don’t have the money to spend on the lawsuits, and even if they won, it’s unlikely they would recoup their costs.
The end result is that because the industry is so small, everything gets decided in the court of public opinion. If you can convince everyone a game ripped you off, you don’t need to sue anyone. You just convince the public and many people won’t buy the games, because again, this industry is tiny.
Is this good? No. It gives large companies outsized ability to pressure and control terms, while leaving the actual legal questions in limbo because no one can afford to litigate. It allows small scale rip-offs, and copying of games from outside territories. It results in a lot of drama. But it is how things actually currently work.
And now, a second brief bit of context setting.
Designers, Developers, and Publishers in Board Games
The court of public opinion in board game development is a result of norms that exist because of the board game industry’s small size. But it’s not the only weird norm. One easy example to point at is the fact that no one is asked to sign NDA’s at things like Unpub, or for playtests. After all, a legally binding contract doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the money to enforce it (or if the IP doesn’t legally exist).
Another example is the importance of credit, and properly having credit assigned. Again, this is a small industry. Credit on projects is a resume, and proof of prior work. But different types of credit mean different things. Here’s a very brief overview of some of those types of credit.
Game Designer – This is the person who did the work for most of the game systems, and what is seen as the bulk of the game design work. They made the prototypes, they conceived of the systems.
Publisher – The publisher, on the other hand, often does all of the “not game design” work. This can include, but is not limited to marketing, production, final art, distribution deals. It might also include things like re-theming, or artistic character design. It’s a huge amount of work, which is why game designers often sell their designs to publishers in the first place.
Game Developer – The developer, then, is a sort of intermediary between the two. They often, but not always, work for a publisher. Their job is to take the core elements that a designer has created and bring them to a production-ready state. This can include designing some small mechanical elements of the game, or redesigning systems or themes, or even adding or removing existing mechanics. It’s a complex job and necessary job, but it mostly involves working with a core system they’ve already been given.
The Events of July 5th
Myles’ accusations against Ming stem from this discussion. I’m going to break this down with some images.
This is Ming’s first request.
He asks for 3 things.
1. Credit as a game designer on the Project
2. $1500 to license a character from one of Ming’s other games to the project.
3. A written contract stating they will pay him $3000 if Power Well is successful enough to merit an expansion. There is no guarantee that the game will be.
Myles makes the following counter offer of $4,500, for:
1. A license for a Re:Act Character 2. The ability to provide a non-designer credit for the work Brother Ming did 3. A thank you in the rulebook 4. Brother Ming will stop making any public statements about Power Well in a negative connotation.
Critically, Myles does not want to give Brother Ming a designer credit on Power Well. In his public post, Myles justifies this based on his concern he will open himself up to a lawsuit from Penguin and Panda if he does so.
Brother Ming believes he is entitled to this credit as he designed the core systems that at a bare minimum inspired Power Well.
Ming does not like this offer, primarily because it results in him not being credited as a game designer. He responds with the following counter offer primarily intended to point out how ridiculous it was to not give him designer credit. (Ming has since retrospectively noted that this was “a dumb plan”. )
1. Red Planet Games will pay Ming $11,500 dollars. $10,000 for the design, and $1500 to license a character from Re;Act
2. Red Planet Games will not have to credit Ming as a Designer on the project.
3. All terms from the above discussion.
Myles, after consulting his own industry sources, decides not to respond.
On August 5th, post Gen Con, Ming reaches out to try to explain why the game designer credit is important to him. Unfortunately, while Ming is being sincere, it’s easy to see how someone (Myles) would see this as condescending.
In essence, Ming is trying to get Myles to understand that from his point of view, Red Planet Games has done is mostly development and publishing work, and as such, Ming is owed designer credit.
On August 7th, Myles responds to Ming. He feels attacked by Ming. He does not feel that Ming is a designer on Power Well. He also feels that because Ming sold the game to Jason, Ming isn’t entitled to any more money for the design, and that he has done enough already.
Ming makes one last attempt to convince him. Myles does not respond.
On August 7th, Brother Ming tweets about not receiving credit, and posts a cropped portion of the final message from Myles. This cropped portion does not include the discussion of costs/payment.
Around September 11th, a long term detractor of Brother Ming succeeded in getting one of Ming’s projects DMCA’ed by Nintendo. This individual is not affiliated with Red Planet Games. Ming believes this is the result of the feud with Red Planet Games, though this mostly a matter of personal opinion. While this individual has bragged about this “achievement” on the Red Planet Games Discord, there is absolutely nothing to suggest Red Planet had any involvement in the DMCA request.
In response to Ming’s tweets on August 7th, on September 22nd, Myles posts the document outlining his interactions with Ming.
On September 24th, Ming announces that he has reacquired the rights to Sento Fighter, and plans to relaunch the game as Re;MATCH, and that he will make a public statement in the next few days.
On September 25th, Ming posts his statement. He’s generally in agreement on the timeline, but clarifies several notable points, including his concern around ethnicity of the characters in the game, his actual intentions with the $10,000 offer, and notably lays out a 12 point list of similarities between the two games.
Now that I’ve laid out the publicly provided information of both Myles and Ming, I’m entering the realm of personal opinion.
The Court of (my) Public Opinion
In the time since Myles has posted his statement on the 22nd, I’ve run it past my industry contacts, and some folks in their circles.
Myles chose to put this into the “Court of Public Opinion.” I suspect he’s not going to like the response he gets, especially among designers and small publishers.
Their general take is as follows: While the whole situation is messy, and at some points could have been handled better, Ming is in the right here. Folks have tended to feel that Myles’ statement is not as exonerating as Myles had hoped. To be clear, this was before even seeing Ming’s side of the story.
It’s not a universal opinion. There are people who feel that the distance in time is enough to justify what Red Planet Games have done. But there are even more who feel that it crosses a line to rebuild a game that you already know exists, and try to bring it to market.
While Myles views the work that his team has done as comparable to cloning a video game, that’s not how the board game industry is likely to see it. Instead, it appears to them that Myles is attempting to rip off someone else’s design, refusing to pay or give them credit, and then rush it to market as a product, not for the love of making games.
Like I said earlier, I’d like to think no one set out to be an asshole here. I’d prefer to believe that Myles’ lack of familiarity with the industry has led him to cross a lot of lines he may not have been familiar with. Frankly, that probably will do nothing but make me look like a naive idiot to both sides. So be it.
That said, while I’m going to try to keep my distance here, I’m going to make one big suggestion to Red Planet Games: Ban the person who has been attempting to harass Ming and DMCA Ming’s projects from your Discord server.You’re doing yourself absolutely no favors by even passively giving the appearance of endorsing the actions of someone who uses anonymous harassment and legal threats as a cudgel against others.
What Red Planet Games has done is generally against industry norms, but they have every legal right to produce and sell Power Well, and never mention Ming again. I don’t think they should.
Why I’m Writing This
I’ve been following both of these projects for quite some time, and I was initially enthusiastic about both. My (frankly terrible) writeup on Sento Fighter is one of the earliest posts on this blog. I was really looking forward to Power Well.
I feel strongly that Brother Ming deserves credit on Power Well for his work that the game very clearly, at a minimum, cribs from. Initially, this didn’t seem like it would be an issue, as Myles and others told me at PAX East that they would doing so.
When things turned sour, I wrote, but chose not to post a write-up detailing why I thought Ming deserved credit. At the time I would just have been starting drama, and I figured that I might not have the full picture. I suspected that there might be info related to Penguin and Panda that might make Myles feel he could not credit Ming in a fair manner without opening himself up to a lawsuit, something I was dead on the money about.
However, as Myles and Ming have now both made their sides of the story clear, and for public viewing, I no longer feel that I’m either out of the loop, or misinformed as to the thoughts and feelings of the primary actors here. While some of the information presented has caused me to carefully reconsider my own thoughts and run them past those more familiar with the industry, I’m ultimately still convinced that Ming deserves Game Designer credit on Power Well.
Disclosures
My name is John Wallace, and I often go by Fritz. I’m the primary writer/owner of Gametrodon. I don’t work in the game industry on any level, but I do have a few contacts and connections with those who do.
The extent of my connections with the two primary folks involved here, Brother Ming and Myles Martin are as follows:
1. I’ve interviewed Brother Ming previously about the nature of fan projects, mostly in regards to Mihoyo and their policies. I also reached out to him for some clarification on statements made prior to posting this writeup, and prior to the release of his public response.
2. I chatted briefly with Myles Martin at PAX East this year about Power Well, and played a demo. I was planning to reach out to get his point of view right before he put up a 8000 word public statement on Sunday.
Neither Myles nor Ming have debated the authenticity of the messages posted.
However, for pretty obvious reasons, they have fairly different takes and feelings about the nature of the interactions, and characterize them quite differently.
I’ve taken backups of these statements, but linked to the source. Should that source go down, I will be hosting the statements myself. This article was written with the content as it was on 9/22/2024 for Myles Statement, and 9/25/2024 for Brother Ming’s statement.
Updates/Revisions:
Any changes/updates to this post made after it has gone live will be noted here.
5/15/2025 Update: Both of these games were at PAX East 2025, and are gearing up to move into launching Kickstarters possibly in the next year, so I’ll be quietly observing. In the event that the original source of the statements are removed/changed, I’ll be putting up my backups, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue yet.
It’s been a struggle to find something to write about this week. Plucky Squire comes out later today, but I don’t think I can finish it before tomorrow. UFO 50 has a similar problem.
I was trying to finish every game Tom Francis ever made, and make that into a bit. But Morphblade is too short and I’m bad at it, while Heat Signature hasn’t grabbed me the same way Tactical Breach Wizards or Gunpoint did. I still intend to play it.
So instead I’m going to write a bit about Strafe, technically now called Strafe: Gold Edition on Steam.
Strafe wants to be a combination of a roguelite and boomer shooter, I think mostly in the Doom vein. I say “Wants to be” and not “is” because a lot of the meaningful roguelite mechanics are missing. There’s no 3-pick-1 upgrades, or branching paths. Its obvious roguelite features are just some light map randomization and permadeath.
I only have one complaint about Strafe. Unfortunately, it’s a big one, and I’m going to illustrate it with a million different examples.
Here it is: Strafe sucks at letting the player have fun. It has the fun moments, and boomer shooter experience, but it hampers its own gameplay in a bunch of stupid little ways. Lets go through them shall we?
A million little issues.
Let’s start with the guns. Strafe has maybe a dozen different guns. They’re all kind of interesting. They’re all fun to shoot. Cool! These sound like good things.
Except all of them have the most miserable ammo pool I’ve ever seen, and you can’t pick up extra clips for them. The player can shoot them until they run out of ammo, at which point they are useless. (The primary gun excluded)
There might be legitimate reasons to only give the player 8 rounds of rocket launcher ammo, but why do I only get a single clip of bolt pistol rounds? What exactly was the train of thought that went, “Hey, in our game with a dozen different guns, let’s not let the player ever really use more than one in a run”?
Also, it makes me run into the hoarding issue. Because I have limited ammo, I never end up using anything but my primary.
I’m just taking images from their press kit because I can’t be bothered to boot the game again.
Next up: Enemies. Strafe’s “thing”—if you want to call it that—is that the game makes it really easy to bunny hop. You basically jump around, gaining speed, to traverse maps quickly. So most enemies are fine. They either shoot projectiles, or chase the player, and are generally non-obnoxious.
Except there is an entire category of enemies that spit acid onto the floor, or spawn acid spewing orbs. The player loses health when they step on acid, and many of these enemies are semi-immobile and obnoxious to deal with. So the movement design says “Run around fast!” and the enemy design responds “Yeah, so you can step in the acid you stupid idiot.”
Speaking of things that make running around fast suck: dark levels. Why are they here? Did a single playtester ever say “You know what would make this fast paced permadeath FPS even better? Not being able to able to see anything.” Or did that just come to the devs in a fever dream?
Please note the 2 remaining rounds on this gun, after which it will be repurposed as the world’s least efficient club.
Also: Key Hunts. Strafe is heavily inspired by Doom, so of course it has doors that require keys to open. Keys that must be picked up. Do you know what I really don’t enjoy in my fast paced boomer shooters? Walking around a map for 10 minutes having killed all the enemies trying to find a single corpse holding a keycard.
Even the secrets are infected with this weird “Get in your own way”-ness. One minor one is the ability to pick up a Superhot style shotgun, making it so that time only moves when the player moves. It’s an enjoyable, clever Easter egg, that adds a cool level of control to movement. It’s incredibly fun pickup.
And it has 25 rounds, and you cannot switch off it to other weapons, or pick up barrels to throw while using it.
The End Result
Many games are bad because something about them is intrinsically broken. Bad art, bad narrative, bad mechanics. Strafe is bad because every single time it looks like it’s going to let the player have fun, it gets in its own way.
I don’t know why this is. Maybe the developers felt that they had to make the game difficult. Maybe they brought across design principles from Doom without questioning them.
I also don’t know that I really care. I don’t recommend Strafe. It’s not just fun enough to be worth playing.
