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.
It's fucked that Warner Bros patented the nemesis system from the Mordor games and then did fuck all with it