Thanks for checking on our community and fan-work policies! We love it when fans and community members take the initiative to expand our games with unofficial expansions, new characters, and original ideas. If you're looking for some guidance on your project, please read along!
Fan Works
A Fan Work is any work of game design, fiction, art, or music which involves (a) Characters from Level 99 Games' universes (Indines, Seventh Cross, Mystic Empyrean, etc) or (b) Mechanics from any of Level 99 Games' published works. For example, a fan-fiction involving characters from BattleCON, a custom-made Exceed Fighter from a favorite anime, or a fan-expansion to Argent: the Consortium would all fall under this umbrella. The main qualifying factor of a Fan Work is that you are creating something new by building upon the existing property/game, rather than re-posting or translating existing material. Here are a few things that fall under this category:
- Tutorials (either Text or Video)
- Fan Art
- Fan Fiction
- Original Characters
- Fan Expansions
- Music Remixes
The first thing to point out is that we want to encourage the creation of Fan Works, and so we've tried to keep our guidelines as straightforward as possible, as well as to provide some tools (down below) to help you. We have a few suggestions we hope you will consider when creating and sharing your original works:
- Clearly mark Fan Works as such - With sprawling universes and tons of characters, it can be tough to know what's in-universe canon and what's fan-made. Please mark any fan-works with the following text. "[Name of your original work] is an unofficial fan-work, and is not endorsed or approved by Level 99 Games. [Name of Property/Character this work is based on] is property of Level 99 Games."
- Link back to source material - A link to www.level99games.com is a nice way to credit us, as well as to help those who stumble upon your work to find the original source material.
- Minimize posting of un-modified source material - When making a Fan Work, try to limit your use of unmodified source material as much as possible. For example, building a new BattleCON Fighter would only require you to post the new Fighter's styles and UA card. The rulebook, the bases, and the game board can all be found in the existing Level 99 Games print-and-play demo game for BattleCON.
We encourage you to share Fan Works with your communities of choice! If you put together and publish a Fan Work, and you would like to let us know, feel free to contact us. We enjoy sharing fan works of particular distinction with our community, and we may even ask to feature your fan work in art-books or galleries on our site!
Community Works
A Community Work is any unofficial translation of an existing Level 99 Games property or game into a new format for the benefit of the game's player community. This includes but is not limited to:
- Digital Implementations of existing Tabletop Games
- Alternate-Language Translations
- Crib Sheets, Reference Sheets, or Pasteups
- Compilations of Official Universe Lore
- Fan Re-skins of existing games
- Fan Work Tools (such as templates for creating original Pixel Tactics, Exceed, or BattleCON cards)
While we appreciate the interest of community members in creating these things, we may wish to eventually license or create digital editions, offer translation rights to another publisher, or license our games for re-skinning. In many other cases, these activities are perfectly fine and wouldn't interfere with our future plans. It's a very case-by-case thing.
First off, we cannot prevent you from doing anything for your own personal use. Recognizing this, if you plan to eventually post your work for the community, we ask that you contact us first and explain your project to get our approval. If we discover un-approved projects of this nature online, we may have to issue takedown notices, which can result in your account suspension in many different communities. To avoid this, contact us early and let us know what you have in mind, and we'll let you know what's reasonable and acceptable.
Aside from our request for pre-approval on the public posting of your project, the guidelines for Community Works are the same as Fan Works.