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!
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.