When he started chatting with Terry Brash, indie game developer kindanice thought he was just swapping tips with a fellow dev. He didn't know that his new acquaintance was going to take his whole game, too.
Kindanice related this story to PC Gamer over DMs this week, and shared screenshots of his conversations with Brash, who did not respond to a request for comment.
The two developers first chatted a little over a year ago: kindanice was a fan of Brash's game Gunrun, and Brash was a fan of kindanice's game Dire Decks, a deckbuilding shooter combo published on itch.io. The developers swapped some coding knowledge and Brash invited kindanice to his game dev Discord server.
A year passed, and then this week, Brash sent kindanice a Discord DM to share some cool news: He'd cloned Dire Decks in a new engine, added some new features, renamed it Wildcard, and put it on Steam under his own name.
This isn't one of those gray area situations where one game derives its basic design from another, but brings its own look and spirit to the table (the dozens of Vampire Survivor-alikes come to mind). The games are visually almost identical, and Brash himself called Wildcard a "rewrite" and "clone" of Dire Decks when he introduced it to kindanice.
Kindanice was taken aback: flattered, perhaps, but confused. He asked Brash if he really thought it was OK to take the art and concept of Dire Decks and put it on Steam under his own name without permission. Now Brash seemed taken aback: He pointed out that the code was original and that he'd redrawn the artwork, and asked if kindanice wanted an "inspiration" credit.
"Bro... there's 'inspiration' and then there's blatantly copying an entire game," kindanice replied.
The question of whether copyright law protected Dire Decks came up. Brash wasn't sure it did, but admitted he wasn't a lawyer. Kindanice felt he had a case, but changed tack, telling Brash that, regardless of what the law says, copying his game just wasn't a cool thing to do and that his other developer friends were shocked and weirded out by it.
"I'm confused, what's weird here?" Brash replied. "I liked the game, so I made a clone with extra stuff. Happens every day homie."
Kindanice asked Brash to remove Wildcard from Steam, and Brash refused. Kindanice then suggested that Brash's reputation would be harmed when the public found out what he'd done, but Brash didn't budge.
"The decision's been made," said Brash. "I accept my fate."
That was the last direct communication between the two developers. On June 3, kindanice posted publicly about the situation on X.
"@terrybrash copied my game 'dire decks' and is releasing it on steam under a different name without my permission," said the developer. "I have tried to get him to take the game down but he is unwilling to do so. not sure what to do in this situation…"
Brash continued to promote Wildcard on X after being called out by kindanice. He also posted an edited clip of the "Bold and Brash" SpongeBob episode in which his profile picture is dropped in the trash—I'm not sure precisely what he meant by that. Wildcard remains listed on Steam with a demo, and Brash has said that it will be free when it releases.
Kindanice is currently working on his own expanded Steam version of Dire Decks. He's considered making a copyright claim against Wildcard, but says he'd still prefer it if Brash would remove the game from Steam voluntarily. You can find the current version of Dire Decks and kindanice's other games on his itch.io page.
