If you were to make a "spiritual successor" type game, how much could you borrow from the source material?
If you were to make a "spiritual successor" type game, how much could you borrow from the source material?
One of my favorite games that I miss dearly from its glory days is (don't laugh!) Fortnite: Save the World. If you've never tried it, do not buy it currently, because all of the greed and shittiness from Battle Royale carries over. Anyway, the combination of Fortnite's intuitive building mechanics with a bunch of weapons you can min/max, extreme amounts of legitimately creative design, story, mission types, led to a genuinely enjoyable experience that I have a lot of fun memories now. I got the game before it became a huge thing, but now it has all gone to shit. To even get to the game, you need to go to the main menu of BR and wade through thousands of shitty creative mode Fortnite dime a dozen """game modes.""" Once you're in the game proper, all of the skins, emotes, and new mechanics that do nothing but make the game worse hit you like a fucking truck as you realize this game got killed by Epic Game's greed and sadness. The game is now barely maintained, the story was never finished, and overall it's a mess.
This is a genuine shame to me, as I remember it being such a blast to build your base, min/maxing characters and guns to make overpowered combinations to destroy zombies with, and hang out with your friends as you do creative missions. So I want to try my best at making a game that can recapture that fun, and that magic.
So, the game needs to be:
- Third Person Shooter
- Zombie Game
- Building
- Lots of Customization and Variety in Weapons
- Story that isn't Completely Fucking Boring
My question is, how much of this can I borrow from Fortnite? Would I get sued for implementing the Fortnite building system? I know I can't rip assets or anything, but would I be able to implement, for example, "the Storm" as an opposing force? If any comrades know, thank you so much!
Much of the video game industry is just companies/devs copying each other (but of course, due to a lack of freedoms, each company either uses proprietary game engines or badly reimplements things).
Fortnite Battle Royale is just a copy of the same concepts as PUBG. No one really gives a shit as no one has earnestly tried to patent general game design concepts.
So yeah, go crazy as long as you don't violate trademarks/copyright. As a personal note, please try to make your game libre. It might actually help you if someone accuses you of copyright infringement and it will also open an avenue of distribution into libre operating systems which can increase the longevity of your game (look at things like 0AD and Supertuxkart) instead of competing for mindshare on sites like Steam, Gamejolt or itch io.
No one really gives a shit as no one has earnestly tried to patent general game design concepts.
It's fucked that Warner Bros patented the nemesis system from the Mordor games and then did fuck all with it
If Palworld is anything to go by, you can get away with a lot. And I think all the mechanics and broad strokes thematic elements are fine to yoink fully, Path of Exile took the shape of the UI and control system from Diablo II pretty much untouched (of course, details change, but the look and feel are extremely similar). The building system is nothing unique, it's just a global grid based system where you can place walls, roofs that double as floors, ramps, and edit them to add doors, windows, and cutouts. Satisfactory has a similar building system (albeit not on a global grid and without the editing function), and the rest of the game is so dissimilar you wouldn't even think of comparing them.
yeah, it's not too specific. but if this game somehow got any semblence of a following i'd be scared of epic's legal team, im in no place to get sued lol. thanks, ill try and come up with something that has the same simplicity but different.
I think if anything, what might get you in any trouble would be if you borrowed too much from multiple places at once. You know how they say you should never do two illegal things at once? You either drive over the speed limit or you drive with drugs in the car, not both at once. If you want to yoink the exact building system, with editing and traps, you probably should alter the rest of it more significantly.
As long as it's a legally distinct product (no confusing trademarks or whatever) and you don't literally rip assets, or decomp code and re-use that, you're good.
I think you're really fine here for taking most of this. Orcs Must Die and its sequels are all relatively like F:STW and I didn't see anyone draw any parallels between the two from even a casual "gee these sure share a lot of similarities" perspective. Granted it's been a while since I've played Orcs Must Die, but from what I've seen from STW they definitely seem to share a lot of ideas between them.
So long as you aren't taking some patented system (like the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor) I really think you can basically make an exact mechanical clone without any legal team really biting. In Epic's specific case look at their acquisition of Fall Guys and the popularity of something like Stumble Guys and the lack of legal action there.
true! i forgot about stumble guys.
I've been working on my Advanced Wars clone for a while now, and so I've researched this a little bit. Game mechanics almost basically can't be copyrighted. It also helps (in my case) that I'm not really cloning 1:1 as much as I'm making a substantially different game in many key ways. Also I'm not using a sprite sheet found online, I'm making all my art assets myself at slightly higher resolutions. Mostly you should worry about:
- using assets (art, sound, other files) you don't have the rights to.
- using trademarks you don't have the rights to.