I’m not a game developer but if I were to make a game, the only ideas that come to mind seem to be “I’m gonna remake my favorite game but change these things I didn’t like about it!” but I heard that’s a bad idea usually.
I’m wondering how much change, and to which aspects (gameplay, mechanics, theme, etc), do you think is needed to make a game inspired by something instead of a rip-off?
If you can’t figure out how to take something change it without breaking the fun then you’re most likely doing a rip-off.
You have to do something transformative for it to not be a rip-off. Just add an example, if you take Hollow Knight gameplay and then make a game with art style heavily inspired by Hollow Knight art and your story is about some other bugs, then that’s pretty much just Hollow knight and as such would be a rip off. But if you took Hollow Knight gameplay and made it about robots in a space derelict that could be transformative enough to be its own thing.