// KOTAKU — GAMING
Devs Behind Needle In A Haystack Clone Complain Their Clone Has Been Cloned By Vibe-Coder
AIClaudeIndie GamesNeedle In A Haystack SimulatorSteamVibe coding
This is gonna get confusing real fast, so I need everyone to lock in for the sentence you’re about to read: the devs behind Needle In A Haystack, which is a clone of the original viral haystack game, Needle In A Haystack Simulator, have accused the developers of another clone of the original haystack game, titled A Game About Needle In A Haystack, of copying their code, as the copy of the copy contains exactly the same error messages as their game “word for word.”
Even just typing that gave me a headache, so let’s rewind a bit. This isn’t the first time we’ve covered copies of Studio Bitdot’s viral haystack game, Needle In A Haystack Simulator. After several clips of Studio Bitdot’s incremental sorting sim went viral across social media in August, Steam users noticed that several similarly titled games, with inventive titles such as A Needle In a Haystack and Story of The Needle In a Haystack, had suddenly appeared on the platform overnight.
As of writing, I count at least fourteen clones of Studio Bitdot’s original game on Steam. One such game is studio NoGlyph’s Needle In A Haystack, which was released on Steam on September 29. To be clear, NoGlyph’s game doesn’t appear to be in any way vibe-coded, and, for what it’s worth, also doesn’t feature any AI disclaimers on its Steam store page.
i made a game where you literally have to find a needle in a haystack
the catch is there are 5,000,000 pieces of hay and only 1 needle pic.twitter.com/q2TehY53iJ
Yesterday, on October 17, NoGlyph accused another Needle In A Haystack Simulator clone on Steam of ripping off their code: Little Field Studios’ A Game About Needle In A Haystack, which was released on October 16.
“When we looked through [A Game About Needle In A Haystack’s] files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names,” reads NoGlyph’s post on Steam. “More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn’t exist in their game.”
While NoGlyph’s post on Steam doesn’t outright accuse Little Field Studios’ clone of being vibe-coded slop, a comment from the team’s lead dev, Jahvin, on NoGlyph’s Discord confirms exactly how many pieces of its code were copied. Jahvin states that Little Field Studios’ game contains 39 “same-named methods” that are “byte-for-byte identical.”
What Jahvin describes is a classic telltale sign of Claude-assisted decompilation: taking a closed-source game and using AI to make its source code readable, then copy-pasting that code into your own game (or, more likely, asking Claude to do it for you).