Steal Like You Mean It

Theft isn’t an easy thing. It requires a great deal of thought, meticulous planning, courage, and creativity. And it doesn’t end there. If your theft is successful you then have to figure out what you’re going to do with what you just stole. Copying on the other hand is easy. You take a look at an original, do the same thing to imitate it and you’re finished. But where’s the reward? What can you do with a copy? It definitely doesn’t have the same value as the original you could have stolen. So instead of copying - steal. 

Steal ideas, mechanics, techniques, in fact steal anything and everything you can. Don’t stand for copying. Copying is easy, and there isn’t any merit in it. If there’s a particular writing style you enjoy a lot and would like to emulate, steal it. Found a web or UI layout you really like? Steal it. Is there a particular game mechanic you’re fond of? Steal it. Like I said before - steal everything you can. 

See when you steal, you’re not copying. In a recent game we were designing at Toy Studio we chose to steal from Tetris and Drop 7. Almost everyone is familiar with the puzzling mechanics of Tetris and we wanted to recreate that experience in a more complex fashion. So we stole every mechanic that we could from Tetris - the puzzling mechanics, how tetrominos fall onto the board, and the manipulation of tetrominos. But then we added pentominos. That changed the gameplay a bit but it still was Tetris, but with pentominos. 

One of my favorite puzzle games is Drop 7. It’s an incredible puzzler. It marries (from my subjective opinion) both luck and skill in an amazing fashion. So we stole the mechanic of revealing elements and simplified it. Instead of number matching based on the number of elements we modified it to be color matching of pentominos. Then, we decided to clear pentominoes based on matching 4 or more blocks of the same color. We included “locked” elements in the form of blocks - I felt rather strongly about them and wanted to recreate the great chain effects one could achieve in Drop 7. Locked elements were revealed when adjacent pentominoes to the locked blocks were cleared. Then we played the game with the stolen mechanics. Soon we saw the flaws.

The locked elements worked great in turn based gameplay where the player had time to think but in a situation where there was continuous gameplay it felt more of a burden. The locked elements evolved. Rather than being displayed as grey blocks that were locked, we included what the blocks would be once they would be revealed. This was a lot more enjoyable. It was much easier for a player to plan large combos and the gameplay started to evolve and emerge organically. What once was Drop 7 and Tetris had become something new which today we call BloxDrop.  

If you were to pay BloxDrop today you would probably notice the stolen Tetris mechanics as they’re the most visually distinct - but as you kept playing it you’d notice this isn’t Tetris (much like our audience has found out). We didn’t copy, we outright stole. And when you do a really great job stealing you end up with something completely new and that you can be proud of. As Picasso once said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”