The Ron Paul video game currently in the works from a Paul supporter in Texas has drawn criticism for having been created using an existing template and modeling characters off of existing video game characters.
The game promises to be "Indie Game Development at its finest...designed, programmed, conceived, and produced by me, D.S. Williams." But Jon Hendren at Something Awful looked at Williams' code and found that the game was made in large part from a tutorial:
Essentially, what this means is that the author is simply following a cookie-cutter tutorial on how to make a video game. In fact, it seems to be this one, which is a cool helpful article that includes all the necessary source code in very clear boxes that make it super easy to copy and paste.
Hendren also finds similarities between characters in the Paul game and some in existing games.
The Paul character apparently is a modified Waluigi from the "Mario" games, and the bigger George Bush/Romney type character is a "Monstar" from the game Braid. The crowd of End the Fed protesters are taken from the game Earthbound, according to Hendren.
"The game I'm developing is definitely not a slightly modified version of another game," the game's creator, 27-year-old Daniel Williams of Houston, told BuzzFeed. "It's true that I'm using an open source game engine, but that's not really a wild concept."
"It's unfortunate that I had left an early version of the game in an unprotected directory online," Williams added. "Rough drafts are rough. This is just some trolls attempt to find whatever they can to make some noise."