Publicly Licenced/Free-Use IP All-Stars!!! Un-Franchise

[SinbadEV]

So, I've been playing a bit of Mario Party recently and was reminded of show much better Sonic Shuffles Movement was, and then all of company specific board game party games, and then of How much better WarioWare would be if it included a board game mode, and Kart racers and allstar games like Brawl and all the various Games with characters from other video games in them... and I was thinking it would be really cool if I could make a game like that but with all the features I want and less painful-game-slowing-down animations...

...and then I was thinking that no-one would want to play my game because they wouldn't recognize of the characters in it...

...and then I was thinking that there ARE characters that I could use... I just wasn't looking hard enough for them.


So what I would like to do is collect all of these characters in one place (maybe a wikia wiki or something similar) so that whenever someone is making a FOSS brawler they will know what characters to include, or making a FOSS clone of Mario Party or Mario RPG they would know what characters to include... or if they are making a FOSS pokemon clone or Card Game they'll know what characters to include...

The basic rules are, no one can sue you for using them (example No Luke Skywalker, Mario, or Living Celebrities), no one will attempt to kill you for using them (example, no Jesus, Mohamed, or Osama Bin Laden), and at least some people will recognize them other then you (aka no Making stuff up completely)

But first I think a forum discussion is in order...

First is categories:

Historical Figures Who No-One is Going to Sue You For Parodying:

Example:
Name: Charles Darwin
Known Associates/Subordinates: An Ape, Spontaneous Life
Enemies: (None that can be included without breaking the "no one will attempt to kill you" rule)

Open Source Project (Or similar) Mascots:

Name: Tux the Linux Penguin
Known Associates/Subordinates: Gnu The GNU Gnu, ASCII Chr$(1) "White Happy Face", ASCII Chr$(2) "Black Happy Face", @Sign
Enemies: Polar Bears, FreeBSDevil

Open Source Game Characters:

DoomGuy Clone from OpenArena
Wesnoth Characters
KungFuGuy from Mugen

Public Domain IP Characters:

Anyone from the Epic Ledgends of the Hierachs: The Elemenstor Saga or Batal in General (see http://elothtes.pbwiki.com/ )
I belive that the HP Lovecraft Chuthulu Mythos is in the Public Domain, as are any books that have entered the public domain

Non-Characters from Universes that the owner of the IP have specifically allowed non-profit "fan art" created:

Example a Jedi or Wookie from starwars.

Generic Characters/Creatures from Mythology/Religions:

Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbad the Porter
Dragons, Kraken and Zombies

Real Animals (Animal Men):

Alligator, Alligator Men

Anthropomorphic Appliances:

Walking/Talking Toaster

Am I missing any categories?

edit:

Generics/Stereotypes/Personalities:

Unix Admin, Fantasy GM, Gamer, Nerd, Bunny Girl

[nemppu]

smoth

[SinbadEV]

Out of curiosity does anyone know of a good pretty generic 2D/3D Game engine that uses a simple scripting language like LUA or VB... I've found a couple options but I was wondering if there's one someone has had experience with.

[KDR_11k]

2d is very easy with PyGame. It's an extended SDL for Python.

Famous characters, eh? How about...
Adolf Hitler

Of course if you just mena characters anyone could use, try looking at Touhou. It seems like every indie game dev can just take those.

[imbaczek]

+1 for pygame, python is super easy and nice, and there are a lot of minigames done in pygame. lots of people use it for ludum dare and similar game making sprint competitions.

[SinbadEV]

2d is very easy with PyGame. It's an extended SDL for Python.

Famous characters, eh? How about...
Adolf Hitler

Of course if you just mena characters anyone could use, try looking at Touhou. It seems like every indie game dev can just take those.

I'm not entirely sure that those characters are actually public in any way?

[KDR_11k]

Not legally but in practice there's about 20 derivatives (being sold for money) coming out every week.

[Anarchid]

Out of curiosity does anyone know of a good pretty generic 2D/3D Game engine that uses a simple scripting language like LUA or VB... I've found a couple options but I was wondering if there's one someone has had experience with.

Speaking of 2d, try Gusanos, it has Lua just like Spring does.

[SinbadEV]

Gusanos is fun... I made a pac-man map... never got around to making much more then making the dots disappear... the idea was to actually activate temporary invulnerability and infinite ammo for a player when they grabbed the power pellet... but then I got bored... speaking of which... I downloaded the Ogre3D SDK and got sidetracked re-installing XP and haven't done anything since... I need to find where all the bored programmers and 3D artists willing to make my ideas for free are hiding... I'll be sure to send a few on to the Spring project when I find them.

[Wolf-In-Exile]

I think its better to create your own characters if you're going to do an 'original' game instead of using existing ones created by other people, even though they're IP-neutral.

Games, books, movies etc come up with new characters all the time, and many have become icons despite nobody having seen them before. Its just a matter of characterizing them well.

[smoth]

smoth

you can only use my likeness in a game with techno viking.

[Panda]

Techno viking rules!

[SinbadEV]

I think its better to create your own characters if you're going to do an 'original' game instead of using existing ones created by other people, even though they're IP-neutral.

Games, books, movies etc come up with new characters all the time, and many have become icons despite nobody having seen them before. Its just a matter of characterizing them well.

I see where you are coming from with this but the idea is to get a group of characters that other projects could get behind... want to make a kart racer or fighter... you could use these characters... I suppose I could spearhead the creation of a collection of new characters for this purpose but I was thinking that using ones that are already established would be a cool gimick that others could get behind... and then, after one game has been made people could borrow the assets from it and make another game, adding to the pool of available assets for these characters... 2D sprite art, back stories, history of adventures (in other games), 3D models that could be used in FPSs or Fighters, or Baseball games... guess this isn't the group to get behind this idea maybe.