Woah! It's flat out wrong to characterize Tiny Wings as a zynga-style copy[1]. 1) Wave Spark was relatively well received, but nothing like a hit, 2) Wave Spark was not available for iOS devices (despite requests that the game be polished and ported), 3) The art and "a few extra weeks of development" is a night and day difference in Tiny Wings compared to Wave Spark, 4) Tiny Wings is also a personal project by a one-man development studio, and 5) Wave Spark is publicly aknowledged as an inspiration for Tiny Wings.

Compare to Tiny Tower, a hit, polished iPhone game made by a two-brother development team that is then carbon copied due to its success by mega-corporate Zynga with exact gameplay systems ripped off wholesale and yet a claim of originality.

McCoy doesn't begrudge Illiger his success with Tiny Wings... Why do you feel the need to hurl a vicious, unsubstantiated attack against him?

[1]As far as I'm concerned, that's an incredible insult.

True, there are mitigating factors. I just got annoyed when Tiny Wings was used as an example of a great game, particularly when the explanation of its success started off by citing its mechanics, and even more particularly when McCoy's focus on games is entirely about mechanics. Tiny Wings may not have copied much, but they copied everything that there was to copy. Tiny Wings is a better game than Wave Spark, but people keep citing it as an example of a well-developed game without realizing that Illiger didn't need to do any playtesting, didn't need to do any focus groups, and didn't need to actually have the big idea.

I'm sorry if that came off more aggressive than I intended. I don't like writing long posts. I think that my perception of the situation might also be skewed by my preference for gameplay over art; I play Dwarf Fortress and Aurora, for pete's sake. I was also following the game-a-week project while it was in the process, so there's that.

Although this is pedantic, wavespark actually is not a flash game, it was made with processing and is a java applet.

Like Minecraft is Infiniminer. In that it isn't and but is widely acknowledged as the inspirational root.