Copyrights

[Digitalic]

You could shoot the copyright owner.LOL

I think that may be slightly more illegal than breach of copyright.

[Shawn]

You could shoot the copyright owner.LOL

I think that may be slightly more illegal than breach of copyright.

Only if you get caught!

[Crash86]

My advice: Just do it.
If they write to you and tell you not to do what you're doing at a later date (and the chances of that are nil), then you can figure out what to do from there.

[Atherton]

My advice: Just don't do it
You will NEVER have to worry about being told to cease work on your game
PLUS you can boast to all your friends about how original your creation is

Lolo looks like he has a pretty ordinary design anyway, why not try creating a
character in a similar vein that has way more personality.

[Corlen]

HAL Laboratory seems to have a knack for creating generic looking characters and slapping a copyright all over them to make up for their lack of personality in looks. lol

[Shawn]

I think it really depends. If it's something that is iconic, than that is more noticeable. But lets say you're making something that looks sort of similar to something obscure, like the Warrior in Gauntlet. There's only so many ways to depict a warrior in low res pixel graphics, so to a certain extent, they are all going to look similar. I think it becomes more of a problem the more sophisticated level of graphics you are using. If you have a character that looks similar to Ryu in Street Fighter 2, that's going to be a lot more noticeable than something that looks similar to the Warrior in Gauntlet.

But even if you take Ryu, there's no copyright on having a guy with a karate outfit and red headband. If that were the case there would be several games that would be in hot water, like a lot of SNK's Neo Geo fighting games. It's only when you're blatantly copying that it's a problem. I've also seen a lot of modern fighting games with similar issues. There are some fighters in Tekken and Virtua Fighter that look pretty much the same. There's a fighter in Tekken that looks pretty much exactly like Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. Another one that looks like E. Honda from Street Fighter. List goes on.

Is this E. Honda? Nope, that's Ganryu from Tekken.