Have you ever designed something that wasn't using a real-world reference, and then somebody comes and points out a real-world reference and goes, "Oh, this is just like this thing"?
TL;DRYes, it has happened, especially with clothing and armor, because wearable designs must fit the human body and movement, so only so many shapes are possible and independent designers end up solving the same problem.
Yes, that has happened. That has happened on a couple things. Clothing, we get that quite a lot because there's just billions of clothing out there.
And they all have to fit the same basic shape. There's only so much variation.
Exactly. And that's actually one of the biggest things that we don't struggle with, but one of the challenges that we have to face is armor, because we come across the same problem where a human actually has to run inside of it. And so there's only so many shapes that we can play with on the macro scale. The micro scale, we can tweak things here and there. But silhouette-wise, a lot of other, even real world and also other IPs, which I have friends in different IPs, and we come across the same problem. It's just the arms move a certain way, the legs move a certain way, and also our torso only twists and turns a certain way as well. And so we come across the same problem, same challenge, quite often. So there are times when I'll get text messages from my friends and be like, "Oh man, you stole my idea." I was like, "I made this six months ago." "Oh, I thought about it last night." I'm like, "Yeah, we're solving the same problem."