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!

  • riseuppikmin [he/him]
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.