@Cazran you realize that I’ve been active on their forums since 2013, and I’ve seen discussion topics like this come up all of the time? The lead developer (Tynan) said in his own words that towards the beginning of development he borrowed graphics from the PA team with permission; but later on he got an artist and just used a similar art style.
Lesson from this: Graphics don’t create a game. (They just create what you see.)
Also, @Haxor
One time I had a wonderful community called Sunspear. (Nothing like the Game of Thrones equivalent, it was just my favourite location from GoT.) We had lots of corn, and potates, a lot of tortise meat and elk, and we were thriving. We even had a sniper and and LMG.
And then we saw our first siege; the first few shots destroyed our storehouse. I had this brawler guy and he attacked the enemy in the name of his fallen teamates. (LMG guy died in a firefight with said besiegers, and sniperguy got critically injured because they had a sniperguy.) So, he was a brawler so all he had was the plasteel knife we started with from the start of the game. He charged into combat and killed the remaining 7 people with minimal injures, because they were all based on ranged attacks but had horrible shooting (somehow they killed LMGguy though) and instead of hitting my guy they’d just hit their allies.
Somewhere along the lines he picked up a grenade and killed 2 people.
It was beautiful.
EDIT: Here’s proof for you @Cazran
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=23.0
If you’re too lazy to look at it, I’ll quote it here:
I drew some inspiration from PA. Moreso from its own inspiration, Dwarf Fortress.
We don’t share any tools. Chris at IV has his own tech foundation; I built this one on Unity.
But they do look somewhat similar; that’s my fault. I’m not a good enough artist to come up with a really good original look. There are only so many ways to render characters on a tiny grid without using animations.
I hope the differences between the game will be enough for people to look past the aesthetic similarities. And if I get some funding at some point I can get an artist to help develop a more unique look.
I do think the similarities are skin-deep. In gameplay the game resembles DF much more than PA.
How did you know I used to call it Starship Architect? That was back in March… I didn’t think I ever mentioned that anywhere. CREEPY (Previously it was mentioned that his first name was Starship Architect. Probably changed for reasons like this.)