Damn! It has been a long and tiring semester but we have finally reached the end of the session and you know what that means…Project Dossier time!
For my project this semester, I decided to create a print ‘n’ play basketball trading card game called Hoopsquad. It is a simple, strategic game that is influenced by the NBA 2K series. You can listen to the podcast below!
Jack Ridoutt · Hoopsquad – Project Dossier
Since you’ve hopefully now listened to the podcast, there is just a wee bit of research that I had to conduct in order to discover how copyright and trademarking works with using player likenesses in my game. I found this information on a Quora question, which was a bit odd and may not be totally reliable but it is what I found and I do trust it. What I found is that copyright is completely out of the question as NBA team names are trademarked but as soon as this game comes to their attention then I am well and truly done for! Not a great thing to see but since its up to the teams to take action on a low-budget NBA trading card game, I find it highly unlikely that they will. There are several violations that are attached to this but since this is a project and nonetheless theoretical, I pretty much have nothing to worry about, LOL! It is kind of a crappy thing to read but yes, that is the world we live in.
In summary, I think the two things that I would take away from this project is to do a lot of research before committing yourself to an idea because I think I could have approached to whole trademarking issue better and maybe used fake team names and player names but I don’t think that would’ve been as attractive to the user compared to an NBA player card game. The other thing is that I need to be better at managing my time and it really screwed me bad when it came to getting round to researching and constructing a playable game. Anyways, I have had an absolute blast this session and can’t wait for the next one.
Peace out y’all!
