For easy reading I’m starting with a summary and a longer version at the end.
Summary:
When developing my game some time ago (saying game X) I got contacted by a game publisher and signed a contract so (according the contract) they have full rights to publish my game X, however after a lot of time with lot of trouble I don't want them as a publisher anymore (with good reasons from my point of view).
Since my game is a very big (Misc game) open/global game about different things (A,B,C,D,E) very wide.
I decided to disregard the contract and change the name of my game (no name yet) and start game Y and only take one part of my previous game lets say A and change most of the GUI and a lot of other aspects of the game.
Now to get further in to detail and the actual question, how far do I need to go to get (rid of a previous) contract.
As I'm still using for example the same maps in the game Y as I did in the game X with the signed contract.
Would that be enough to get rid of a previous contract or are there more things going on? In general when is it a new game.
Longer info:
I have been busy with this game for a long time now as an independent game developer. And things are starting to really look amazing at the moment.
Some time ago a signed a contract with a publisher, and most of the things went good in the beginning.
However important things like advanced payments caused the main trouble as communication and deliveries of demo's were mostly always delivered on time from my side also according to the contract.
Other issues were the communication from their side as I never heard any response and mostly of bugs/QA/testing while in the meantime my over 100 beta testers giving me complete useful reports about all the issues.
After multiple further issues, and the publisher just keeps on promising things but not following them according to the contract I decided to cancel any further development of the current game and start working on a new game with new name taking only one part of the old game.
I have changed almost everything from the gui, functionality but of course some things remain from the old game mostly a few 3D objects but also some maps I spent a lot of time on.
The question is mostly, when is it a new game.