General > Discussion

Original IP roguelike for the Chaosforge?

<< < (2/6) > >>

Klear:
I'm still hoping for a Roadside Picnic themed game, but that's and IP as well, probably.

Reef Blastbody:

--- Quote from: LuckyDee on August 24, 2012, 09:44 ---Although Lovecraft will likely be protected by an SEIP field as well, this background will probably not be eligible either, but it gives a good idea of what flavour I'd be looking for.

--- End quote ---

Actually, this is a little bit weird. All of Lovecraft's works are old enough that they're open domain, which means you can legally use them to do whatever you want. The problem however lies from the fact that Lovecraft himself borrowed liberally from fellow authors, several of which whom still have their works copyrighted and trademarked.

The same applies to licensing for specific names; "Call of Cthulhu" is trademarked by Chaosium, for example. August Derleth is an author who took the reins after Lovecraft died and he injected the series with a lot of stuff people commonly assume was Lovecraft, like Hastur, which would also be off limits. Basically, anything Lovecraft vaguely eluded to in his stories is fine, but when you get down to the official naming and additions later on, it's a no-no. Many Lovecraft fans are familiar with dimensional shamblers or byakhee but Lovecraft never actually named these creatures; that was Derleth/Chaosium/etc., so using those names is forbidden but not the descriptions/what they are.

You could do a Lovecraftian RL, but you would need to navigate through what is okay and what is not okay to use first, which is somewhat of a headache. I could likely produce a list of "safe to use" Lovecraft mythos if given enough incentive (ie at gunpoint).


--- Quote from: Klear on August 24, 2012, 09:54 ---I'm still hoping for a Roadside Picnic themed game, but that's and IP as well, probably.

--- End quote ---

Roadside Picnic itself is indeed protected as IP. STALKER however, was created without any licensing or funding paid to the creators, because it is a bit sticky as to how much it "heavily borrowed" in terms of themes, as opposed to directly referencing/using names/characters/etc.

You can't exactly copyright the idea of a dimensional rift/magnetic field that causes weird crap to happen, so they were able to get away with it.

LuckyDee:
I'm not saying it has to be Lovecraft, I'm saying that any new idea doesn't have to be restricted to just one genre. Take King's Dark Tower for another example.

There's a lot of un-owned stuff lying around that could easily be slapped together and still make a credible (for lack of a better word) background.

Silhar:
I'd love to see somebody creating a RL game set in some steampunk universe.

Dungeons of Dredmor do not count.

emulord:
Anyone remember the madness cartoons on newgrounds? I feel like that could be a fun roguelike game.
You're in a 25x50 x5 floors building, or about that size, with random guards and items.
Guards would pick up items and maybe kill each other and level up, getting more dangerous as time passes on. This makes a natural progression of difficulty even tho it is 1 statically generated random map. You can go up and down floors at will. Win when youre the last alive in the building.

Features: guns, modding, science, dark magic, mutations, destructable/interactive terrain.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page