choice of homestuck

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hello everyone im new here and I have a question how well do you think homestuck(web comic written by Andrew hussie) would be as a hosted game,im talking about different lands,god teirs,adventures and character relationship based on your choice could it be possible or am Im getting ahead of myself

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I’m not that familiar with Homestuck, but I believe that due to rules of copyright, you will not be able to make a game directly based on it, nor can you make one that references its characters/lore.

You can, perhaps, take inspiration from it to form your own game, if writing a book is your intention :slight_smile:

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As someone who has been in the fandom:

It wont do well.

Many of the nice people have left the fandom for good and are not keen on stuff as much, and the rest are vile

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I’ve never liked Homestuck personally, and have generally steered clear of the fandom. They’ve never really been “kind” to me, for lack of polite wording. Whether that will influence the game? Perhaps.

It would have to be an on-site, fan only game, discliamered that no money is being made. For the the reason alone that it is copyrighted by whoever made it, HG would not allow you to publish it. Legal reasons and what not.

But if you just wanna make an interactive fan work. Go ahead. Make sure you specify though, to avoid legal backlash.

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As said, DON’T!

The nasty a-holes in the “fandom” would not leave the cog community alone

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Whoa damn, I didnt know things were that bad in the fandom. I only heard they were cringey.
But yeah, that kind of media might attract heavily critical people.

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As someone who doesn’t understand what a homestuck is, I would need to see more and get a proper summary before deciding whether or not, I would be interested in it.

But using the name and characters is a copyright issue, as well as the “Choice of” name title, if you aren’t an official writer.

Take inspiration for it and make your own story with it.

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With homestuck you can neither take inspuration nor make your own thing.

Seriously. It’s not worth the try

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But using the name and characters is a copyright issue

Not to sound rude but what are you talking about

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I mean if I would to make it,it WOULD be free because I don’t see the point someone paying for something that isn’t mine

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Still, CoG or HG wouldn’t be able to publish it as a game, free or not, because that would be publishing under the claim of owning Homestuck, which they don’t. That can cause a lot of legal issues. As long as it stays on this site however, there is no harm. Think of it as if you were to write a fanfiction, you wouldn’t upload it to amazon and say," I own this, thus I’m self publishing it, but it’s free because I don’t own it."

That makes no sense there, so why do it in this case? You get me?

Like I said before, keep it on site. Ultimately HG would turn it down in any case, due to copyright infringement risk anyway, but its better to start with the mindset of “its an onsite fanwork that’ll never be published.”

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What Frosty is talking about here is the words of your game title. " Choice of Homestuck.

“Choice of” is technically copyrighted by Dan as seen here

In order to use it, you would have to be signed on as an author of CoG and thus have the ability to use it for that approved game, and that game alone. Which fan made games are rarely signed on as authors/writers for CoG, so this would be handled by Hosted Games, which also doesn’t own “Choice of” so copyright infringement galore.

Also, Homestuck is an owned word technically, by the creator of it, so putting it in the title of something you want to publish, even if it isn’t for profit, is copyright infringement.

Think of it like an essay. Your friend says here use my sentence but the rest of the paper is yours. If you don’t source them in that sentence it’s plagiarism.

So if you don’t have a license to use “Choice of” or “Homestuck” for commercial use, non profit or not, that is copyright infringement.

Which is illegal i might add.
copyright

So uh, to quote vine, “Hoe don’t do it.”

Just keep it fan made, and on this site, and avoid the drama.

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I wish I’d spotted this thread when it started! Ah well. (But maybe the original author has reply notifications turned on …)

I got the impression this was a hypothetical question - “if there were a CYOA game based on Homestuck, what would it be like?” As others have pointed out, it’s someone else’s intellectual property and couldn’t be developed without Andrew Hussie’s permission - but we could still speculate.

On the practical side of the speculation (so to speak), what I think would be hardest about programming a game like this would be (so to speak) the “shipping grid” - all the possible romantic interests a player might want to pursue. (While there’s more to Homestuck than romance, this would be a major draw for a lot of fans - and a major disappointment if it wasn’t available.)

Considering how much of Homestuck itself is driven by text chats, though, I think a text-based game - with all the typing quirks intact - would capture the feel of Homestuck just as well as a game in a more visual format.

As for the lands, and the god tiers, and the SBURB/SGRUB game play … Hussie left a lot of this unexplored, even though it’s there. Back during the Homestuck game Kickstarter, I recall a lot of people hoping for, more or less, SBURB as a playable game; the idea of being able to explore all these other parts of the world that are only glimpsed in the comic itself is an appealing one.

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man, if there was a choice homestuck fanmade game i’d def play it. but like people have already pointed out it’d have to be a fun side project and not something you’d plan on selling cause copyright and all that. but, it would be possible as a IF game, with some work, i think.
maybe keep it to like a few characters only in one book?
or if you have a following on other sites do polls for your OCs and not use the original characters from the actual webcomic.

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When I was 18 I was obsessed with Homestuck and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all of the intricate rules of that world. I wrote fan fiction. I drew my OC characters. I bought the merchandise and still have a few shirts and posters … and books and mugs and hoodies and whiteboards and calendars and music albums. I even contributed to a few failed attempts at making a fan fighting game for it.

Actually now that you mention it, based on the sprite work I had done for that last one, Toby Fox once sent me a message asking if I’d be willing to help out with a side project of his … which I didn’t reply because I was in a bad place at the time but it would’ve been cool to work on that. I think he was trawling through the forums to help with a lot of the sprite work for enemies, though it’s been a long time since then.

Anyway if you wanted to do something with Homestuck, I would steer away from using Sburb and Hivebent and Troll and other such vocabulary terms and instead create your own “thing” with its own rules that still captures the childlike irreverency, the sense of wonder and exploration, and the thrill of coming to understand the weird rules of a new world well enough to excel within it.

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I am still obsessed with Homestuck. A couple of months ago I was sitting at a bar in Mexico, looking at the resorts lining the beach, and a friend and I started speculating about a Resortstuck AU where all the trolls ran megahotels (with the Alternia and Beforus trolls on opposite sides of Nichupte Lagoon)

edited to add: “obsessed with” sounds kind of bad. let’s say “committed to”

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Is that so?

I figured that a certain pirate from I, Cyborg had a lot in common from a certain pirate from Homestuck down to both aesthetics and personality. Glad to know I wasn’t seeing mirages.

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Or a pair of pirates (Quillon’s motif and colors are different depending on which gender s/he is). At the outline stage Quillon was just the crime lord who ran the local pirate crew, but when I started writing and realized I had a Pirate Queen/King I just had to give Mindfang and Dualscar a nod.

My most dedicated playtester was a Homestuck fan who had a twelve-sided die with the astrological signs and would use it to decide what his playstyle would be for a given run. I’d get bug reports that said “Playing as Kanaya, and …”

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That’s pretty cute actually.

I’ll admit that in my working project, it’s very incredibly heavily influenced by Problem Sleuth. One of the big players in the story is even called Peter ‘Sleuth’ Sternwood.

Back on topic though Homestuck (and even Problem Sleuth really) would be pretty fun. I can imagine you constantly getting stats for things that don’t matter and don’t actually effect gameplay all that much. Like number of Fancy Santas owned (you’ll never find any) or you not being able to do something due to not having proper stats, but you’ll always never have the proper stats to do that thing by that point anyway.

It’d be really interesting to see someone try and abuse Choice Script’s system by trying to recreate the incredibly meta nature of Andrew Hussie’s tales. Like a Metal Gear Solid ‘Find Meryl’s codec number on the back of the game box’ kind of situation.

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I’m picturing a minigame on the Stats page, or being able to replay the game after you reach God Tier and set variable values and jump around while still, in some sense, being in the same story. (And maybe you get a Fancy Santa after all?)

While the word “admit” sounds more playful than guilty to me, I’ll nevertheless go ahead and say that there’s nothing wrong with having influences. I sometimes run into people who seem to think that being derivative, which I agree is dull, is the same thing as having identifiable influences. But even the most original writers have their influences, and when a reader spots them they can be anything from a satisfying little spark of recognition to being able to see an older work differently because the new one contrasts with it in intriguing ways.