Potential names:

• FOSS Fighters
• Open Tournament
• Libre Brawl (Or some combination of these)

I think is best to start with common archetypes (think DnD classes) and make movesets that feel right within those stereotypes. That should make a good starting point and you can tweak from there.

How about TuxWars ?

Write the engine first.

Create characters, stages, and items as modules.

Release them together as a fully playable pack, while leaving the door open for user-created modules. Let the community clone SSB using your engine.

(The StepMania model)

Character ideas: The KDE Konqi, Katie and the whole host of dragons (Yoshi style). Xenia the Fox alternate Linux mascot. Lemmy and Mastodon mascots.

Provisional name idea: Smashtest (like Minetest until they figured out to call themselves Luanti).

Other name ideas: Open Source Battle Royale

Stage ideas:

• Smart Home (Home Assistant themed),
• GRUB (a few traversable lines or options)
• GRUB rescue (one line, Final Destination style)
• Rapid Coding (a DK falls-style scrolling map)
• vim (a close quarters map similar to the Game & Watch map, optionally with walls as the characters are “stuck in vim”)
• i3 (a pre-made map styled in a tiling window way, or perhaps dynamically splits the stage during battle)
• compiz (do whatever you want as long as it looks cool, wobbly, wavy, cubey or 3d-like)
• Hannah Montana Linux or Biebian (without a picture of the person in question but the colour scheme and the shape of stage elements would highly imply it’s those distributions)
• Blender 3D interface
• FreeCAD animated assembly

Special Move ideas (that can work with most characters):

• Update (a small rest/vulnerable period followed by a buff)
• Mailing List (a beam of emails)
• Harden/Vulnerability Patch (could paint/plaster offensive move, or it could be a curl up defensive move or roll around like yoshi/sonic/jigglypuff etc.
• Release Candidate (powerful offensive move with some drawback or self damage)
• Bug catch (a forceful two handed clap in front, or using a net)

Other attacks:

• cronjob (Tux tosses a clock that explodes)
• Tail whips
• Fire breath

Obstacles, enemies, hazards:

• a bug
• a kernel panic/freeze
• the meditation guru
• firejail
• a green-coloured GPU driver
• git issues
• dependencies/dependency hell
• Blender default cube

Your game doesn’t have to have every single element FOSS-themed, as it might make it feel too nerdy, but if you were short on this kind of idea and wanted some, here you go.

Tux should have several skins that represent different distros like a red fedora for RHEL lol.

My other dumb suggestion is having nmap be a floating blue eyball

Clippy as a hidden character.

My only request is make it so that in April Fools you can play as Windows and it’s slow af

Tux the penguin, the FreeBSD daemon, the OpenBSD pufferfish, MS Clippy, GIMP’s Wilber, the Rust crab, the GNU Gnu, the SuSE chameleon, a Firefox, the Darwin OS duck, and a dude in a red Fedora.

Does it have to be specifically FOSS characters? You could have a huge roster with public domain characters (too).

My brain instantly remembered MUGEN…

my biggest complaint when playing competitive character-based fighting games is that they always nerf the overperformers instead of buffing the counters. Never nerf characters, it always feels so bad to have a character nerfed.

Tux can/should be in there, but make your character cast from a wide variety of public domain sources. Use real historical figures, classic literature, and mythology.

Some specific ideas:

• Thor (but not too much like the Marvel interpretation)
• Poseidon
• Dracula
• Sherlock Holmes
• Captain Blackbeard
• Steamboat Willie (as of its copyright expiring)
• T-Rex
• Cthulu
• Merlin the wizard
• fairytale characters

Also make a solid modding API to let people add their own characters, items, and stages.

The characters could start out as just the ones in supertuxkart and then go from there. I’d be happy to help with the movesets, balancing, and playtesting. I don’t have any experience with Godot yet but I have been meaning to learn!

So broadly you will find categories in games like Smash Bros and so on. Some characters will be heavy, some light, some fast, some slow, some strong, some weak, but each trait creates an axis. The ideal distribution of characters is to have all areas of the multidimensional space filled or if not filled at least alternated.

For example, you should have one heavy, fast, weak character, one heavy, slow, strong, but maybe not a heavy, fast strong or a heavy slow weak. You can chart them on a two dimension axis at a time, then use the characters from Tuxcart etc to fill the space based on what makes sense, eg the Gnu should be heavy but also fast, but it is definitely a prey animal, while penguins are smaller and fast with a more moderate attack level, maybe even weak.

Once you have some of the extremes filled you can consider subversions of the paradigm. For example, a compiled language is slow at creation but fast at use, so maybe a mascot for one of those could have two modes, switching state and therefore characteristics.

Another thing to consider would be the dynamics of your interactions. Are you going for the jumping around of Smash Bros? If so, lots of the details about their camera work can guide your decisions. What about the overall pacing? Do you want frenetic play like Smash Bros? Combos? Strategy? Lots of things to look at there with a narrative approach to the characters as representing their projects, for example Wilbur is smaller and supposed to be super modular, so maybe having quite a few modes with different characteristics would work, while something like puffy is great for water levels alongside tux and any other aquatics.

The gimp maskot should be able to paint things that last a short time or until he paints the next thing.
Examples: wall against projectiles, spikes on the ground, platform to jump on.

Also I want to see ferris from rust.