BODY: There are worse feelings than being cloned. One of them is being cloned better.
That's roughly where indie developer Powski of The Code Otter found himself this month. In late September, after more than ten months of work, he announced Crown Me Again — an incremental hack-and-slash in which your character never leaves the throne, auto-attacking toward wherever the cursor points while loot piles up across seven equipment slots and rarity tiers. Pixel art, permanent progression, Steam page live, a Q1 2027 target. By late October it had gathered roughly 2,000 wishlists.
Then King Dies Rich appeared. Registered on Steam on October 3 and formally announced on October 22 by developer Outlane, it shares the throne-bound premise, the cursor-following auto-attack, the loot-driven build system, the seven gear types, the pixel look. Outlane says the graphics are handmade, with animations and sound effects generated by AI. Browser and Android versions went live October 12; the Steam release is dated November 13 — months ahead of Powski's.
What stings isn't the resemblance alone. Powski's read is that "AI was instructed to create a similar game and give it greater depth," and the feature list does run deeper: gem synthesis, throne buffs, a merchant, a forge, a kingdom development tree, multiple stages, a boss bestiary, a legendary equipment vault, competitive siege events — all in a free-to-play package. He stops short of calling it a clone, and says mostly that he's sad.
Reddit pushed back with some fairness: both games owe an obvious debt to Nodebuster, convergent design happens constantly in the incremental genre, Crown Me Again had no demo and little traction to copy from, and tuning that many interlocking systems is real labor no model does unsupervised.
The insider take
Japan's indie scene has argued about paku-ri — the knock-off — for decades, usually over mobile puzzle games with the serial numbers filed off. What's new, and what AUTOMATON's readers latched onto, is the compression of the timeline. A Japanese solo developer typically spends a year building toward a Steam Next Fest demo, because visibility here is earned slowly through Bitsummit, Tokyo Game Show's indie corner, and doujin circles. If a wishlist page can now function as a design document that someone else ships from in six weeks, that whole patient model of announcing early to build an audience starts looking less like marketing and more like exposure.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).