How about TuxWars ?

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.

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.

As far as move sets go, you could always base them on things about the animal for animal based mascots. Like an ice slide for Tux, a charge for the GNU mascot, a long distance tongue grab for the KDE mascot, etc.

Also, as far as characters go, you could always include any public domain characters, like Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Steamboat Willie, Winnie the Pooh, etc.

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.

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)

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.

Please have decent mod support so that we can import/create our own characters and movesets and use them in battles against other players online.

Please allow custom maps and items as well.

My brain instantly remembered MUGEN…

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

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

I would learn the process of distributing software on flathub

You talk about ideas for different characters already, but there’s no base for any of this yet as far as I understand? Like, Smash characters all have a standard moveset that they share, there’s certain physics, rules, all the menus, the levels, etc. etc. - does any of that even exist yet? I would really not bother with thinking about content like characters when there’s 0 features or code yet. You don’t just want to hardcode a bunch of characters.

Clippy as a hidden character.

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