This dude straight up copied another game, slapped different paint job onto it and then claimed it to be HIS OWN GAME.
I started out playing Oni's Rogue-Like. I really liked it, but I thought it could be better. I joined a modding Discord for it and started a total rewrite of the game, meant as a mod that you could play standalone so that it wouldn't break with every new update. We called it ChonkyMod.
Eventually, slogging through the original game's code got tiresome, and I realized I really didn't like a lot of the original art. So I thought, what the hell, I'll pay for artists to make new art. And while we're at it, I'll change the game to fit my vision of a more interesting trainer game with story and more of a focus on character development rather than Rogue-Like's gameplay loop. Someone else came up with the name Project [Redacted], and I liked it enough to roll with it.
Excited about this new project and thinking that others would be into this idea as well, I wrote a little description of it and started uploading preview builds so people could mess around with the new art, the 16:9 aspect ratio, etc. I also created a Patreon so that people could contribute to the game's development, since I'm just paying for everything out of my graduate student stipend. I had no illusions of making money off of this game - I don't intend to expose myself legally, and frankly I don't need the added pressure to be productive when this is just a passion project for me.
Progress on this new project had been slow while I focused on the art direction. Laura was the first character we designed, then Rogue. I'm not a very good writer and found myself working on the project alone, so I used Oni's dialogue to introduce the characters. This was a mistake, but it was laziness while looking for placeholders, not evil intent.
This all was going fine until two days ago, when I discovered that there was a
thread here about ChonkyMod where people had started discussing Project [Redacted] as well and, predictably, claiming it was dead. One of the preview builds was up and obviously very buggy. So I
chimed in to explain the situation. Since the original thread seemed to be confusing people and I wanted to clarify that I was no longer working on ChonkyMod, and since the cat seemed out-of-the-bag now that an .exe of the Project [Redacted] was up here, I requested that we start a new thread properly labeled as a new game project. My hope was that it would be a place where I could share news about the project for anyone who thought it sounded fun.
That's how we got here today.
I never attempted to market this game as anything but a project spun off from and inspired by a mod of Rogue-Like - it's very plain to see, I've made no attempt to hide it. I never claimed to have come up with any of these ideas. I never intended for this to be any kind of official release or announcement of the game. I don't care about competing with Rogue-Like. I just wanted to work on a project that I thought was fun and share it with others who, like me, wanted to explore the premise of Rogue-Like more fully. I've always been very open about what my intentions and vision for this project were, and I stupidly assumed that the paper trail of my posts here and on Patreon were clear enough to convey that.