Sorry to hear about this, but don't let it dishearten you from making games and open sourcing them.
Someone stealing your code doesn't take away from the fact that you accomplished your goal of making a complete game. And from what you just wrote - that was your intention.
Regarding your blog title, I'd add 'timing' as well as 'marketing'. Titles of both submissions were remarkably similar ("Flappy Bird in HTML5" vs "Flappy Birdy html5 clone created using the Phaser framework"). Maybe the timing of your submission was off.
Also you can now state that you're the original creator of all the HTML5 Flappy Bird clones that have been popping up recently.
I was ecstatic to see the other forks but my smile does a 360 everytime I see him getting the credit for it. But I'm happy to report that it didn't discourage me to open source the things I create: https://github.com/marksteve/val :)
Yeah. My timing was off. But I think I now have a better idea on when and how to post things here :P
I can't claim that :P There are some good clones that were genuinely created from scratch like mine.
Marketing is definitely important here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7023467 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7201353 good timing + HN-specific introduction on this one: 300+ upvotes, made #1). But I think there’s at least another factor here: his version is more fun, because it’s faster-paced and has better graphics (obviously). So I’d say it’s also about more quality. Being more fun is more important than not being a rip-off in relation to quality too.
I totally understand why you’re pissed off, but I recommend trying (it’s not always trivial) to see further than “it’s all marketing”. Most of the time there are other factors at play, and nothing but good things come when you get to know some of them.
I'd be less annoyed if his version was indeed better but he just replaced the graphics and bumped the physics values. So I can't accept that his version was "more fun".
But I agree that there are things I didn't consider. And I learned a lot because of this event.
It seemed to me that aside from poor timing, people upvoted it because it used flappy bird assets. I guess quality isn't the best word but I picked the phrase from a presentation I recently read and it sounded appropriate :)
Linux had a much more friendly and welcoming community attitude. OpenBSD/NetBSD developers had a bit of an anal-retentive BOFH streak to them. Linus used strong language, but he was very easy-going. He invited folks in, and allowed code from immature developers in, so long as the interfaces were right. Turned out that build a much bigger developer community. It also turned out that ability to code today is not indicative of ability to code five years from now; many of the relatively immature folks who contributed to Linux early got really good over time.
Ultimately, the larger developer base allowed Linux quality to beat OpenBSD quality as well.
> Linux had a much more friendly and welcoming community attitude. OpenBSD/NetBSD developers had a bit of an anal-retentive BOFH streak to them
That may have played a role in this, but not a major one. What probably contributed most to the success of Linux was the commercial redistribution and accompanying marketing efforts by companies like SuSE (they even sent free CD sets to unimportant Open Source developers, including me) and Red Hat.
Someone stealing your code doesn't take away from the fact that you accomplished your goal of making a complete game. And from what you just wrote - that was your intention.
Regarding your blog title, I'd add 'timing' as well as 'marketing'. Titles of both submissions were remarkably similar ("Flappy Bird in HTML5" vs "Flappy Birdy html5 clone created using the Phaser framework"). Maybe the timing of your submission was off.
Also you can now state that you're the original creator of all the HTML5 Flappy Bird clones that have been popping up recently.