What legal fucker-y?
Are you referring to Gzone not paying employees while he or she continued to take in subscriptions?
The only thing relating to a legal issue would be if the copyright / trademark holder of the IP (Nickelodeon) chose to go the route of a cease and desist or worse. That being said, someone (Gzone) would have a very tough time saying they and they alone own AP, when AP is based entirely on someone else's copyrighted or trademarked intellectual property. Art is more of a grey area: you could charge for the time spent to make art of something, but if you have no ownership of the trademark or copyright, that too could could be taken from you and you in turn charged by the IP holder.
Sure, you could be nice about it and ask to take over AP and everything involved with it, to continue the game in the event that Gzone does return. But with anything less than a very clear, logical, non-bullshit reason of ghosting their employees, coworkers, and customers; I'm willing to bet a majority of posters on this forum would vote on Gzone not being involved especially after what occurred.
By your posting on this forum and being upfront with customers on a level that Gzone never has been, you (in my opinion) should have a long discussion with everyone involved (you stated as much already) and force the takeover of AP and not allow Gzone to be involved in any form whatsoever.
It's possible to create a timeline of updates and releases of the other game side by side with AP, and It's interesting how said updates for breeding farm coincided with less updates for AP as well as less conversation from Gzone regarding AP. Clearly, Gzone has shown they lack the ability to manage multiple projects, or even 1 project over a period of time.
The legal fucker-y refers to the legality around commissioned art, even parody based work stuff like Amity Park.
In short, while he may not own the right to Danny Phantom as an IP, he does own the right to the artworks he's paid commissions in and should he return in X amount of months to find us using his commissioned artwork, it becomes a murky grey which opens the door to legal action.
Not to mention Breeding Farm being a totally original IP, it would cut and dry should we use his commissioned assets and he provides invoices, receipts and texts of verbal agreements (which do have some legal standing in themselves).
However...
He doesn't own the IP of Danny Phantom, thus, we're allowed to make our own parody legally speaking with our own commissioned art.
He also doesn't own the generic idea of a 'monster breeding sim' - So, while we can't use the characters, all in spirit we could make one.
There are more discussions to be had amongst the team and I do have a plan to someone salvage the mess left for me to pick up in a way I feel, while not perfect, will at least be the most pragmatic and best course of action... Can't say more than that for now.
Things are in motion and circumstances/things are changing *very* quickly.
