Even though it has only been two days, we have crossed the 25% mark! I can’t thank everyone enough for the amount of support we have received, whether that support comes in the form of a contribution to this campaign or just spreading the word. It means a lot.

I have also been in awe at another kind of contribution people have been offering in droves: translations. I have had at least four different people come forward expressing interest in helping to translate Hexoshi into another language. Because of this, I have added an answer to this question in the Questions section. In brief, Hexoshi uses gettext for translations, so to translate, simply create a translation file from "data/locale/hexoshi.pot".

But one thing I’m seeing come up a lot is the notion that Hexoshi is a clone of Super Metroid. I consider this to be inaccurate, so I would like to address it. I don’t think of Hexoshi as a clone of Super Metroid. Rather, I think of it as a new game inspired by Super Metroid, though it also has some inspiration from other sources.

To explain the difference, to me, a clone is a game that is designed specifically to be similar to another game, generally as similar to that other game as possible. Some examples of clones are Kapman, LTris, and Open Invaders. There is nothing wrong with making a clone, and there are a number of legitimate clones that I enjoy. However, this is not what we are doing with Hexoshi. We are not necessarily attempting to make Hexoshi similar to Super Metroid or any other title in the Metroid series. What we are attempting to do is make Hexoshi a great game in the same genre as Super Metroid (what I describe as "Metroid-like" and what some people describe as "Metroidvania"). Since Super Metroid got so many things right, that just happens to include doing many things the same way as Super Metroid.

In fact, almost every aspect of Hexoshi’s design was made not because Super Metroid did it that way, but because it simply is better than the alternatives. I don’t want to itemize all of these, but here are a few choice examples:

• For Anneroy’s starting weapon, a laser sword was originally considered, but ultimately rejected because it would be more expensive to animate and complicate the design of the game.

• Anneroy’s weapon is a universal arm cannon rather than a handheld gun because this permits adding just about any kind of projectile weapon without drawing new guns, since those new guns would increase cost. Another possibility I did consider was making projectiles shoot out of the palm of Anneroy’s hand, which would look really cool for energy weapons, but would just make no sense if physical weapons such as missiles were added later on and would also necessitate more animation for the arms (it would look really silly for Anneroy to just be holding out a hand the same way the arm cannon is held out most of the time).

• Doors are opened by shooting them because it is simple and straightforward, prevents the player from accidentally going into adjacent rooms, and lends to the possibility of adding doors that can only be opened with a weapon obtained later in the game.

Of course, we are still in the early stages of Hexoshi’s design. As time goes on and Hexoshi is developed further, I suspect that it will start to look less and less like Super Metroid. That it looks so similar to Super Metroid now is just a testament to how many things that game did right.