How to build a fan game without taking anything

Whatever Floats Your Boat is a boat-building survival game I built on Polytoria. Players assemble boats from parts, survive storms, earn currency, unlock materials, and sink each other.

It is also a fan remake, inspired by a Roblox game of the same name. That word carries obligations, and most fan projects discharge them badly — not maliciously, just by never writing anything down.

Say what it is in the first sentence

The project page states plainly that it is an independently developed fan remake inspired by the original, that it is unofficial, and that it is not affiliated with the original game’s developers, with Roblox, or with Polytoria.

None of that is legally magic. What it does is remove ambiguity for the only people who matter here: a player wondering whether this is official, and the original creators wondering whether someone is passing their work off.

Ambiguity is the thing that turns a tribute into a complaint. Most of the cost of removing it is one paragraph.

Separate inspiration from assets

These get conflated constantly, and they are completely different.

Inspiration is taking the idea — boats, storms, survival — and building your own version. Assets are taking the files. The project states that it does not use scripts, maps, models, artwork, or other assets taken from unrelated Polytoria games, and that all current scripting and game systems were independently developed unless otherwise credited.

That second clause is the one doing the work. “Unless otherwise credited” only means something if the credits exist and are specific.

Credit at the level of the individual file

The credits page names the artist for the game icon, and then goes further and lists every interface icon separately with its source and license — a screwdriver icon from Flaticon under a license requiring attribution, a repair icon from a CC0 pack, and several icons from named Polytoria community members.

A single line saying “icons from various sources” would have been faster and would have been worthless. It tells nobody whether the attribution-required icon has its attribution, and it gives none of the individual creators anything they can point at.

Per-asset credit with the license named is the version that actually satisfies the obligation.

Do not over-claim in the other direction

There is an opposite failure that gets less attention. Having been careful about attribution, it is tempting to stake broad claims on everything you did build.

The project explicitly does not do that. Rounded terrain, scaled primitive shapes, buoyancy systems, building mechanics, storms, and survival gameplay are described as general game-development techniques, not original inventions of this project.

Which is true. Buoyancy is Archimedes. Writing an implementation of it does not make the idea yours, and claiming otherwise invites exactly the kind of dispute the rest of the page is designed to avoid.

Leave a route for complaints

The last piece is a stated willingness to take attribution and ownership concerns seriously, with a way to raise them.

Most disputes in small creative communities escalate because there is nowhere to send a concern except a public post. A named contact route converts a potential pile-on into an email. That is worth a lot, and it costs a line.

The short version

• State that it is unofficial, in the first thing anyone reads.
• Distinguish taking inspiration from taking files, and say which you did.
• Credit per asset, with the creator and the license.
• Do not claim general techniques as inventions.
• Publish a route for someone to object.

This is not legal advice and it is not a shield. It is the difference between a project that has thought about the question and one that has not, and in practice that difference is most of it.