legal issues with borrowing battle systems and such

[mac_girl]

Hi, I'm considering making a little game that is kind of like early Final Fantasies but the battle system kind of like Pokemon. Is this legal to use the Pokemon battle system? Or do you think I'd get complaints because of it? I want to make it 1 character like Dragon Warrior I and kind of like FF but with a rock-paper-scissors system that Pokemon uses...possibly throwing out pets...but not sure if that's legal either.

Thanks :)

[StealthyCoin]

I don't see any problem, lots of games use those systems. Especially if you hybrid them I doubt anyone will notice.

[akb825]

As long as it's similar but not an exact duplicate, I'm sure it will be fine. (since they probably don't publish the exact details, I'm sure it's impossible to get it exactly the same anyway)

[Jake]

I'm pretty sure you can't copyright/patent gameplay, so I'm willing to bet your safe

[Joseph Duchesne]

Unless your game happens to have a tetris like battle system, I'm pretty sure you're safe ;)

[mac_girl]

Ok, thanks :)

[Vengoropatubus]

And even then, I'd bet that classic tetris gameplay is in the public domain by now. :)

[Rushyo]

I'm pretty sure you can't copyright/patent gameplay, so I'm willing to bet your safe

You can't patent gameplay, but you can patent the algorithms behind the gameplay. Doom 3 suffered from this with its shadow-rendering I believe, since Creative owned the rights to this algorithm. ID and Creative made a compromise. ID could ignore the patent if they used Creative EAX.

Still, such patents are relatively rare and certainly nothing worth worrying about in an indy project. As a general rule, you can copy battle systems as you please.