This is honestly amazing, I can't believe how many inside community jokes you managed to fit in and still make it feel cohesive. Thanks for letting me live the dream and romance Junkrat;-; I've also thought about doing VN:s of universes tied to big brands but it feels scary that there's a risk they'll make you take it down when you've spent so much time on it. Do you guys think that's a valid concern, or do they just not care?
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Hi! I'm Sal, I wrote all the code and I co-wrote the story with KJ, the artist on the project.
Thanks for the kind words! It means a lot. As for taking a risk on big intellectual properties: yeah, it is scary. I honestly don't know if I'd do it again. It was easy to take this risk with Overwatch because of how explicitly supportive Blizzard has been of fan works. Making a fan game of a game is iffy, because that's when things can get a little risky. Our approach was this: we didn't use any in game assets that weren't being used in already big fan works; we did not make the game the same genre as Overwatch, making a VN of a VN, for example, is probably gonna draw bad attention; and we did not charge any money for our fan work. That being said, I'm just a programmer, and by no means super informed on any of this legal stuff, so a lot of it was us hoping for the best. Hope that's helpful?
P.S. We, too, are glad someone has finally been brave enough to allow everyone to date Junkrat.
Just to add on, since Sal beat me to replying while I was tracking down this video, I definitely think that is a valid concern that was more and more on my mind the longer we worked on this. (We started working on this project as a joke and thought it would take about 3 months, but we liked what we were making and just kept adding to it and it ended up taking about a year and a half.) Then, about halfway through working on the project this Wired video with Jeff Kaplan came out and where he literally said "What's fun about Overwatch and the characters is that they belong to you guys and you can do whatever you want with them." And having that super explicit endorsement of fanwork made me feel a lot more comfortable about the likeliness of us having any issues.
So I guess my advice would be to try and find that for whatever you are thinking of making. See if you can figure out what is the creators' general stance toward fanwork is and go from there. If you're super worried, the Organization for Transformative Works, the parent organization of Archive of Our Own, has a legal committee and they can probably give you better advice than we can.
-KJ