Tenkai: An Idea...

So, I tried out Epic Pets recently, and I was pleasantly surprised with it. I loved the designs for the lightning cat and the later forms of the earth (?) jackaldog, as well as the textures and interface.

But at the same time, it troubled me that this would mean I'd be getting into yet another nonlibre fandom that would have to remain separate from my original work, and which by putting restricted ideas in my head would limit my creativity.

Then I suddenly got an idea. What if when I revisit Tenkai—my old, kind of vague monstergame idea—I make it a libre monsterpet game? I'm not sure what licence I'd use, but definitely NOT anything more restrictive than the CC-BY-SA or the GPL.

Do you know what that would mean?

It would mean something that's like Pokémon or Monster Farm, or indeed, Epic Pets, but which you could freely use the mons from in ANYTHING (anything), even commercially, as long as you were comfortable releasing it under the same licence as Tenkai. And you wouldn't even have to label your fanmons "fan art" when posting on deviantART or something, unless you wanted to, of course. We're talking open source culture here.

No more risk of takedowns. No more "well it's technically illegal" or "well they haven't come after us yet so we don't know" or "well it's a grey area..." bullshit. Everything. You. Made. Would. Be. Lawful. Period.

Currently I'm toying with various concepts for how to make the game interesting and different, because even though it's kind of supposed to be a "libre alternative to existing things", I still don't want it to just be more of the same. One thing I'm experimenting with is the idea of giving each creature a completely different kind of control system. For instance, among the creatures I have concepted up so far, the "Sonata Snake" would be controlled by playing notes with the keyboard, and maybe, like, depending on what the other monster was doing in battle it would give you a note and you have to play a particular chord to evade, or another one to block, or another one to grab it and constrict it. And if you played particular sequences of notes/chords or something, you might be able to do awesome combos. Another, the "Cutlark" (I'm not sure whether I like that name or not) might rely on using quick reflexes and careful timing to slash and evade with the cursor. I've always kind of liked monsterpet games, but at the same time often felt like they're too much about luck and monotonously spamming the same attack. And at the same time, recently I've really gotten into games like Robot Unicorn Attack and the Flappy Bird imitators (I guess you might call those arcade games?) and I kind of like their fluid, continuous pacing, and how simple and intuitive the controls feel. I feel like if I could combine those two experiences (cool monsters in an interesting world and a fluid and intuitive, relaxing yet challenging control interface) it would be a really interesting game.

Rough concepts for Cutlark, Sonata snake, and the logo.

Initially I wanted to make the new Tenkai a Stablehand spinoff and give each of the monsterpets the ability to "archetype" to any attribute at any time, with their abilities and strategy changing a little, but... I don't know about the status of that now. I think it would go a long way toward making the game more interesting, giving each individual monsterpet more individual character (I may not have mentioned this before, but in Stablehand, I see each character as being more able to use each attribute as they get "better" at it, with each person's ability to get "better" at each attribute different, and that would come into play in Tenkai too), and making especially multiplayer type things potentially more unpredictable and interesting. On the other hand, though, I'm not sure how well Stablehand attributes and the kind of creatures I'm actually creating for the new Tenkai would play together. The stuff I created for the "old" Tenkai definitely seems like it would fit though, and there's a good chance I'll recycle it back in, so... I'm not sure this isn't going to happen either.

(Another thing I thought about for a brief moment, if Tenkai does turn out to be some kind of Stablehand spinoff, is mystery beings as monster companions. It would be kind of weird because they're sentient and can even talk, albeit in their own language, but then again... I guess that didn't really stop Digimon.)

So... yeah. Those are my plans for Tenkai right now. It will probably take a lot of time for them to really materialise into anything, but I thought I should share them with you.

Footnotes

1. The rules for copyleft licences are a little complicated sometimes, but the way I understand it, I believe they actually permit you to use whatever licence you like if you didn't actually pick up any of the assets from the original source and edit/edit off them. That is, if you made a model of your fanmon and posted it somewhere, you wouldn't have to "share alike" (use the same licence) unless you edited it from one of the mon models I'd already made, or very, very, very strongly referenced it by doing a retopo of it and then making it into your fanmon or something. If you took the game source package and inserted your fanmons into it, releasing it as a fork, that would require "sharing alike", but if you only distributed models with rigs, that wouldn't.

   I'm going to have to figure all this stuff out before too long because I can sense there will be similar issues cropping up with Stablehand too. I think there's a pretty high probability I'm going to not just work this out but become some kind of lesser expert in copyleft licences by the time either of these projects gets into anything resembling a finished state though.