I think this is basically a copy of Gerrymandle?
What next? words.horse which is just Wordle?
Some of these refinements are much more important than most new ideas.
And making a gerrymandering game is a relatively obvious idea that I’m sure hundreds of people have had independently.
Even the simplest details are different, like e.g. in Wordle you know which letters are in the right or wrong places but in Mastermind you only know some are but not which.
¹ And because this is HN, I have to point out that that is just a personal preference, it does not in any way reflect on you, the reader. You are free to enjoy or dislike whatever you want.
Mastermind has equiprobability of colors and configurations.
Wordle has etaoin shrdlcu. There is some structure close to interleaved vowels and consonants. Also an arbitrary list of real words.
TIL, this was not a typo and is the ordered sequence of most common letters appearing in English words.
Telegraph operators ranked the letters as etaonrish.
elect.horse is a daily gerrymandering puzzle: the horse is losing the popular vote to the cow, the donkey and the goat, and you draw equal districts on a hex map so it wins the most seats anyway. It needs JavaScript to play.
I only clicked because I have a horse, with whom I spent a few miniuts out in the paddock before daylight listening to the coyotes whoop it up so close you could smell there not dog , but not bad, odor.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/teaching-players-to-rig... (2018)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
Linux is a copy of UNIX. Who cares
Ulysses is a copy of the Odyssey, Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, Stardew Valley copied Harvest Moon, Fortnite copied PUBG, film directors copy and spread each others’ techniques and storylines all the time. George Lucas even admits that Star Wars was heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while Kurosawa’s film was derived from historical plays and John Ford’s westerns.
"Blue Prince" is heavily inspired by earlier works, those works just aren't video games. You could say the same all the way back to ADVENT, the Colossal Cave Adventure of the 1970s being inspired by adventures in an actual cave.
Of course good games do something we haven't seen before or do it better, but they are also invariably products of a wider culture. A big part of why Animal Well doesn't need to explain itself is that a modern video game player knows how this sort of game works and so when they get Slink or B Wand or similar they realise they can explore places they couldn't reach before.
Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?