THE UNFINISHED FORGOTTEN GAMES MAUSOLEUM

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unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Hello everyone! I wanted to make a thread to talk about games in our past that we worked on, intending to make a full game, but for whatever reason, the game got left by the wayside, and now will most likely never be completed.

I'll start with one from my RPG Maker 2000 days.

Game Name: Elemental Clash
Engine: RPG Maker 2000
Intended Length: 80 Hours (>.<;; the hell was I thinking!?)
Actual Completed Length: About 40 Hours

This was, at one time, going to be my big, epic fantasy RPG masterpiece. Eight characters, representing eight elements, each with their own story. Then after that, those eight characters move into four groups with a new story. And then all the characters join one massive group to complete the game. Needless to say, I never got that far.

I wanted this game to be massive, and even in its incomplete stage, it is. 893 Maps. 48 possible party members (though only eight were permanent), several years in the making. But after all that work, I looked back and realized "I'm only about half way done!" And then it died. I lost all interest in it.

I suppose I could take each character's story and make a separate game out of it. But I'd want to redo it to make it all polished anyway, so... not likely XD

In hindsight, this was an important learning experience for me about game scope and planning. I learned that shoveling in more and more characters and plotlines without a good unified story was a big mistake. This all seems obvious now, but back then, it wasn't.

Screenshots below the hide tag!


Bad art! Oh man, this is embarrassingly bad! >.<;;


You chose which order to play each character's story by choosing an element. Each element was represented by a character.


The character representing the element of Darkness was a dragon who wanted to become a human (spoilers: he becomes a human)


An airship that wants so badly to be the Epoch from Chrono Trigger. It could teleport you from the fantasy world to a futuristic alternate dimension that should have been cut from the game because it has little to do with the main plot


A part of the massive Overworld. I was not good at making overworld maps XD


Do you have a game that'll never be finished? This can be its memorial. Share it with us, and tell us about your experience, and what you learned from it. :D
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I'll take any chance I can get to show off the 60 seconds of gameplay I made for Chancellor Yakra: Ace Attorney. You can click that link and "play" the game in your web browser, which got as far as me figuring out how to kinda sorta use the most basic features of the Phoenix Wright Case Maker engine, and no further.

It was planned to be a Phoenix Wright clone where you play as Yakra, the villainous chancellor from Chrono Trigger who is secretly a monster. In the original game, Yakra first put Crono on trial and sentenced him to death, and later prosecuted his own king and nearly won. These would have been the first and last cases of the game; in between you would have four other cases where you traveled to each of the other time periods, and prosecuted the playable hero from that era for something they'd done (Frog's failure to protect the queen, Robo's betrayal of his fellow robots, Magus's impersonating a prophet and starting a war, Ayla's rashness leading to Laruba Village getting burned to the ground). Yakra would be presented as a good guy throughout the story, despite secretly being a monster, and in the end he would change history and triumph over Crono, using the Rainbow Shell to forever imprison Lavos underground.

I still think this was exactly the right amount of stupid to be the best idea for a spinoff game ever. Unfortunately, the Case Maker software is obnoxious, and finding graphics for minor characters from CT and formatting them to work in the engine was too much work for such a silly idea. I abandoned this game at approximately 0.3% completion, having spent a good fifty hours on it which resulted in less than a minute of gameplay.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
Ahh, this is a fantastic idea for a topic! I imagine so many of us have gone through an "epic" phase like that...

In ~2006 I started an RPG in RM 2k3. I was planning an huge gamewith all sorts of customization, a unique battle system, spanning a bunch of regions, huge cutscenes... that sorta thing. It was named Illogikal, and it was about the world if everyone over the age of 25 died in a horrible apocalypse. A young man named Pione inherits his father's research for a machine capable of producing tons of energy, and so starts a power company. He's loved for pulling the world out of a crisis and hated for profiting off it - and despite being CEO of his company his job was mostly fighting off assassins and thieves.

Anyway, there was this whole big story with the apocalypse and a wannabe Sephiroth villain and a really bad love interest, and it had a huge list of features that I actually went and implemented before even getting that far in the game:

  • Custom / edited sprites for map and sideview battles
  • Paper Mario "timed hits" system (brutally hacked into 2k3)
  • Characters with unique commands ala FF6, custom skills could be upgraded w/ accessories
  • A limit break system where you could equip items to decide how your gauge got raised (taking damage, dealing damage, healing, etc, liberally stolen from FFX)
  • Each character set of skills that could be given bonuses by equipping elements to them (poison element adds poison condition, etc.)

...nobody had ever explained the concept of "scope" to me back then. Plus, I was new and at that point of gamedev where I assumed I could get as much done as a full-time team of devs if I just "worked really hard" ;-_- I got about four dungeons and three cutscenes and one metropolis in before I realized it'd been three years and I hadn't devved past my own prologue.


Luckily I came to my senses at some point and started working on smaller projects, although the calling to make an epic is always there in the back of my head.

EDIT: I found the files on my computer and took some screens >__>


LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Slashphoenix, that's the story of my life, except instead of giving up when I realize it's been three years, I keep working on it for another six.

I have six or seven other unfinished games, but... I'm still working on them all. I can't bear to actually abandon things. There was one other game I thought I had fully and completely abandoned, but I came back ten years later and finished it for the Revive The Dead event a couple months ago.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
I can't remember the year, but I started an RMVX game called "Memories of a Ghost." It was my first attempt at creating a darker, more "horror" themed game where you play as a vengeful ghost out to kill people.

I don't know exactly what happened which stopped me from finishing it, but I kind of forgot all about it.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
Hahaha, oh god, Lockez. I not-so-secretly want you to drop all that crap and make a game full of those MMO-style boss fights...

Abandoning stuff used to be really hard for me, but now I'm at the point where often I throw away a project as soon as I'm bored. I'm scrolling through my "Hiatus" folder and it's got ~40 projects in it, and my scrap folder has... ugh. I'm at something like 15 completed games vs. 100 abandoned. My K:D ratio is terrible :P

EDIT: Also, playing as Yakra sounds like a blast. The trial is still one of my favorite parts of that game.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Yeesh. I have so many unfinished projects, it's not even funny. Most of them fell victim to the usual underestimation of scale that plagues us all.

Though I do remember one particular project that I enjoyed working on, but due to a combination of laziness, inexperience with the maker, and the fact that the characters never really, "clicked," with me, that I ended abandoning the project.

It was a comedy game called Heroes of Nothing. It was supposed to be poking fun at the traditional Final Fantasy tropes (such originality, I know!) of a 4 character party, lighting crystals, and saving the world because they're the Heroes of Light, blah, blah, blah. Except one of them wasn't. One of the characters was actually a Hero of Dark, sent to prevent the Heroes of Light from completing their quest. Of course, the rest of the group didn't know that, only that one of them WASN'T a Hero of Light. So there was a sense of unease throughout the party.

Speaking of party, I think my favorite part about the project was the characters. The party consisted of a thief, a knight, a White Mage, and an android. They had interesting personalities and gameplay styles: the Knight was the tank of the group, but she was too timid and weak-willed to actually draw attention to herself. The thief actually had a skill he could use to draw the enemy's attention to her. The android used the robotic equivalent of Black Magic (flamethrowers, poison gas, live wires, etc.) and she always applied too much calculation in real life. While the Knight was timid, if she ever got knocked unconscious (K.Oed in battle) she would switch personalities to a violent, psychotic murderer and attack everyone, friend and foe. And the White Mage was just a White Mage. Except he was black. Get it? A Black White Mage? The NPCs would all try to call him a Black Mage, except that he wasn't and he would quickly lose his temper. Yeah, it was funny for all of 2 seconds.

Unfortunately, the characters were also the worst part of the game. They were fun to write for the entire length of the intro dungeon, then they got boring almost immediately afterwards. Hell, I could only decide on a name for ONE of the characters, and even that was stupid. I ended up just naming them Rogue, Knight, and Mage! Mage's character was by far the worst. He was so boring and I was afraid of offending people that I didn't even want to write him!

I had the whole story planned out, too. Lighting the Crystals was only half the game. At that point, the one traitor to the party would be revealed, and the rest of the game would be spent fighting the traitor.


I think the final nail in the coffin for the game was the fact that I had originally intended it to be a FUNNY game! After a while of planning, I found that I just couldn't write anything funny for these people. It was all too serious, too dramatic, and too boring. Perhaps if I rebooted the game as more of a blend of action and comedy it would be better, but there were too many problems with the foundation of the game that I just gave up and salvaged what I could into a better project.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
For by sole RPG Maker 95 game, and maybe my first RPG Maker 2K game, I tried making a game based off a book I wanted to write. It was about two groups of five adventures (making the total cast ten) that searched the world for the 100 McGuffins Myst Crystals. "Tried" being the operative term! I disliked how the skills of 95 had certain animations tied to them, and I couldn't change them. I was, obviously, a bit better off in 2K, but, ultimately, the game fell apart anyway.

Do I dare mention the various attempts of Final Fantasy Foolishness? I think the first one was probably done with 2K, and I didn't try it again until I got VX. To say the least, that project always fell apart at the seams!

There were four games I tried to make with RPG Maker XP. The first one was Nakaiahi Wars. Which might be a familiar name to some. Anyway, I had no clue how to balance the stats, and totally had an in-game cheat that exchanged money for experience. Second and fourth games don't count because they became Matsumori Days and Legacy Reborn respectively. Third one, though, does. That one was the absolutely terrible House of Askigaga. There was just no heart to that game, and it fell apart because of it.

VX had a few unreleased games too, I think? There was definitely The Fukanuma, a sci-fi game in the Matsumori series about Mina trying to get back to Earth. No, wait, that was the short story, The Arbiter Code. The Fukanuma might have been a prequel to that. Or something. Ugh, I forget! Or the memory wishes to be blocked forever. Probably the latter!
Eight characters, representing eight elements, each with their own story. Then after that, those eight characters move into four groups with a new story. And then all the characters join one massive group to complete the game.

That's actually a pretty cool concept. But without a strong team of developers it would never happen.

Oh boy, here we go- getting me to talk about MY vaporware is gonna be a long one.

The Big One

Although this wasn't "forgotten", it's hope of being made in RM was, so I guess it still counts? The idea has moved on to looking at a bigger and better future, so I'm only gonna talk about it's RM history as to keep valuable information secret. If you recognize the game and know it's name, please, for my sake don't mention it. I want to keep everything I can under wraps.

Name: Redacted
Engine: RPG Maker 2003
Intended Length: It's always varied, but "epic" is the best answer.
Actual Completed Length: 30 minutes at it's longest, in the only demo that was ever released.

I can't talk about a lot of it for previously stated reasons, but basically it was my big Rudra game- made in the era of Balmung Cycle, Forever's End, etc. The glory days of stealing things.

Basically, the game was first created when I was a child, after being inspired by Final Fantasy 7, Legend of Dragoon, FF8/9/10 and other classic RPGs. It's coming up on its 14th birthday soon. It's my life's goal to complete the game- it's the reason I got into game development and the reason I keep going.

I hate talking about it because I can't say anything about it publicly FUCK. Have an old ass screen, from the last version to use stolen materials:



Dreamer

The first game I made using custom graphics, which was started before I began using Rudras and shit, back when I was on GamingWorld. It was about some kid who created a world out of his dreams and trapped his former friends in it, ruling them like a god. Idk, it was poop. It's forever cancelled because I have better things to work on.



A Simple Tale

This was the first time I ever seriously tried to tone something down in order to get it finished, so I guess it was the first non-epic I ever envisioned? Needless to say it didn't get finished anyways because I am the god-king of vaporware.

It was about a small boy who gets lost in the woods, finds himself at the mansion of a ghost gentleman and befriends him. The two then go on adventures or something. There was no formal writing done beforehand so the whole thing is a trainwreck.



Endeavor

Another attempt at an epic RPG, this time set in a medieval world of religious mythology. The story was about a man trying to find his brother, under the guise that he was heading out to kill him- only for the party to discover that the brother is a saintly man and the MC is a jealous prick, who then becomes the villain. This game marks when I started trying my fucking ass off with graphical edits and what I could make with rips, exemplified by the worldmap:

http://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/29496/locker/Worldmap.PNG

That's only part of it. It was about 4x as large and it took fucking FOREVER to create. I'm still really proud of it though.

As for the other stuff, I don't really care to talk about it. I have a folder on my computer dedicated to primitive GDD's about my older stuff, and it has 58 files in it. Every one is a concept for a different game that never got made.

I am the fucking king of vaporware.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Oh, right! I still need to post what I learned from those messes!

Back then, I was pumping out games in about a week. Maybe two. I maybe took a day off, then was up and running again. I had so many ideas! But, thing is, I barely put any real effort into making those games. You can see the old screens in Legacy Reborn, and they're pretty reflective of the kind of effort (or, rather, the lack thereof) I was willing to put forth back then.

I'd like to think I put more thought into my games. I mean, I dunno what it is about the stream-of-consciousness blogs that I've been known to write, but, having the ability to write out these ideas in my head in a public space (even if nobody posts any responses) really seems to help me!

Though, getting feedback helps too! Back when I was churning crap games, I was getting no feedback at all. There was no improvement. The developer's skills were not developing. It was only when I came to RMN, and saw Avarice that I realized that I actually had a really, really long way to go.
Erynden
Gamers don't die, they respawn.
1702
Eh, why not? I have A LOT of games I've worked on, some are actually the reworks of the same game/story over and over, but probably will never see the light of day. Here's a few.

Rising Nation - Foundation - RM2000
I remember when I was working on the first version of this game and I released it on a Release Something day through mediafire because I felt like I didn't have enough going for me to warrant its own gamepage. I have at least six different versions of this game, albeit, they're quite similar with somewhat differences.

What the story was suppose to be about was that the player would play as a captain of the Tristania Kingdom, Vincent Frederickson, a son to one of the three heroes who defeated the evil magus, Verrick Frederickson. Vincent would later be betrayed by the Queen of Tristania and escapes Tristania lands alongside the Princess to a neutral land. He would later be convinced by the Princess to start a force that eventually becomes a Kingdom to combat not only Tristania, but the kingdoms of Halton and Germaia to unite the land under one rule.

I had plans of letting the player train soldiers into different combat styles, what party members could lead certain part of the army, fortify their castle, etc. Also had plans to let the player decide what kind of allies Vincent would have, like recruiting the aid of harpies he just saved or start a trade route with an elven town if he didn't save the harpies. I tried to make it simple, yet ambitious at the same time, but those didn't go hand in hand with me and along the way I stopped working on this project.

Alexandria - RM2000
This was the one project where I tried making with only Final Fantasy 6 graphics, and the reason being was, it felt like it fitted the story very visually for me as I was going for a dark theme. This game collapsed because I really, really sucked at putting graphics together at the time, especially Final Fantasy 6 graphics and just never came back to this. To me, it felt like it just had to be FF6 or bust for this story to have had to work. But, here it is now, in this topic. ^-^;;

Like I mentioned, the story for this game was suppose to be dark. The player would've played as Raleigh, an old man that has retired from the ranks of the Ezekiel Kingdom. One day, he was off to visit his daughter, his granddaughter, his son-in-law, and his old war buddy, Kenrick. However, upon his arrival, he finds all but Kenrick dead and Kenrick badly injured. He learns from Kenrick that they were killed by one man and the man had the insignia of the Alexandria Kingdom on his clothing.

Raleigh goes to Alexandria to find the killer and have his vengeance while Kenrick follows along to make sure Raleigh doesn't do anything too drastic. Throughout the story, Raleigh gets pulled into many conflicts within Alexandria and makes allies and foes along the way. His allies would make up a pair of sisters, with the younger sister looking identical to his daughter and brings up conflicting thoughts within him and a nobleman who leads a rebellion against the Alexandria Kingdom.

He eventually meets up with the killer and finds out that he is a servant to the Prince of Alexandria and the reasoning the Prince had her killed was merely because she received a letter from her friend that was working on a new type of airship and wanted to warn her of its development. She wanted Raleigh's daughter to give the letter to Raleigh and have him plead to the king of Ezekiel to prepare its defenses. However, that obviously didn't worked out as planned.

I forgot how I had the ending work out altogether, but basically, at the end, Raleigh snaps and kills the Prince and his servant. The new airship was sabotage by the rebellion and bombs didn't detonate as planned and went off while the new airship was in the air and not when it was docked, like they were suppose to. Then, the airship crashes, killing Raleigh and fellow party members as well as the village the airship falls upon. Oh, and before the final stages of the game, the player learns that Kenrick has actually been dead this entire time and that everything he did, Raleigh did himself or imagined.

Zaira - RM2000
This was going to be a two to three part game, mainly due to the fact I was using a program (the name escapes me at the moment) that would allow me to use non-midi/wav files for the music and I didn't want to have the game to be a gigantic download.

The player would play as Lyall Hrolf, the last Kobold remaining in the world. He would come across a little girl called, Zaira, who wants nothing more than to return home. However, as she never left her hometown before she doesn't know the way there nor how she gotten so far from home either. Lyall is accompanied by his childhood friend and elf, Neala Gearoidin, as well as an old, charismatic man, Jantis Walden. The three of them would travel throughout the lands to help find Zaira's home.

This game was mainly about three people trying to get a lost little girl back to her home and to her parents. That was it. There was no evil ancient that the three of them had to defeat in order to save the world. The only real threat was a mass murderer who claimed that Zaira was the reincarnation of the world's Goddess and wanted to claim Zaira's life to stop the Goddess' revival. Although he was correct that she was the Goddess' reincarnation, she didn't awaken any powers of any sort and just remained a normal girl.

Abraham Greene and Penelope Piper: The Secrets of Lionel Island - RM2000
I am ashamed to admit it, but this was one of those projects that I wanted to make just so I could go, "Hey, look! I made a project! It isn't grandiose but I made it."

The story focuses on a well renown Sorcerer, Abraham, and his assistance, Penelope. Abraham was asked by the king to go to Lionel Island to help the towns residing on Lionel Island that are being plagued by monsters. To be honest, I don't remember too much about this one, other than half of the party members getting K.O.'d (at the first dungeon) and getting replaced by another set of party members, and that the Lionel Island was home to an ancient evil that was awakening which caused all the monsters to attack. Oh, and Abraham was the only one who could use magic throughout the entire game.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
I'm just going to talk about game ideas I've had at random because I don't think I've worked on anything other than the ones I've released that have more than 15 minutes of gameplay. So here's some prototypes I had that kind of worked nicely but I didn't really get round to completing and have shelved indefinitely for now.

Ghost Up to the Sky About a boy and God and a car crash and solving puzzles using a mouse. This was supposed to be my IGMC entry then I ran out of time and decided to create a last-ditch Account Mu.

Wake Up is a cute little puzzler but it was cute and not much else. A lot of the mechanics of this non-linear puzzle have been translated to Account in a much more promising form anyway.

Secret to Christmas. I had this idea about a year ago for dodging enemies and getting coins to progress. But I played Last Minute Gift recently and it's like Unity peered into my head. Very excellent game, that one. And that means I'm not making one of those, at least without bringing an extra twist now that Last Minute exists.

Living City - I will probably still try to finish this. Ex-convict David gets pushed out to the suburbs as part of an Another Home project, which leaves prisoners to rehabilitate in "safe" environments. But then a murder happens and David is convicted for it. But then he has to prove his innocence.

Estranged Politician. A politician is stranded on a desert island and has to solve puzzles to get off. I had a lot of ideas like this one. This one still has promise since it's so bare. I'd call it the Cope Island of puzzle games. I should still finish it.

An Uncertain Forest An RTP rendering of the Lexical Node map-swapping idea. It has really good atmosphere too for an RTP game. Oh well. Better luck next time.
My very first game that I started back in 2004 on RM2K3... oh man. I put quite a bit of time into that, finished the first main town and a few areas after that, but then that bug that wipes all your maps hit the project and I'm not sure what happened after that, but I have been able to only recover a much earlier version of it in which the first main town is only half finished (edit: I actually did just somehow recover a more recent back-up, but there is still a large piece missing on the big town map that I used to have. At least most of the rest of the game is kind of back in one piece again).
But boy, does it suck. It's one of the worst games I've ever seen from an RPG Maker engine and I'm glad I never uploaded a playable version of it online, because I would be embarrassed to death if anyone got to play that abomination of a game (though there are some screenshots of it out there on another forum).

-The mapping is terrible, and most of the interior maps are way oversized and empty.
-The combat was pretty much auto-attack only. I don't think I had bothered with custom stats and skills at all.
-The dialogue... god, the dialogue. It is the worst. My writing skills were at an abysmally low level, and despite that, I still had quite a lot of dialogue in it, making it only worse. My English back then was atrociously bad and full of grammar and spelling mistakes. English not being my main language certainly didn't help much either. Re-reading my old dialogues now is causing me so much pain; I didn't think it was possible for writing to be this bad.
-The story, as cliché as humanly possible. Young anime protagonist (actually he's the same guy as I use in my current game, lol) lives in a small town and monsters invade the land. You are the chosen ones and go with your friends on a grand adventure to kill the big bad evil.
-Way too ambitious. The story was supposed to take place in an alternate version of the real world, but it would also travel to a whole fantasy world and have up to 20(!) different playable characters that the player could swap out between in towns.

View screenshots at your own risk. I will not be held responsible for any damage they may cause you.


My second game, started in 2006, was even more ambitious than my first, but I barely did get started on it because I realised my game making skills sucked too much to realise what I wanted to make (thank the gods). The only thing I made for that were the sprites of the main characters, the first 3 maps or so and an intro scene that was dull like hell.
The main problem with the second game was that I only wanted to tell a story with it, and that's one of the worst mistakes you can make as game developer.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
lockez that case is perfect as-is. it doesn't need anything more done. (but you should finish it one day. when you're given three wishes just ask for yakra: ace attorney to be finished)

i could fill up this whole topic probably but



i once started a furry game in rm2k called "amazing grace" because ????why????



i used to futz around with sprites. not great but eh









this is HEAT. heat was a game about a modern scientist getting warped back in time in order to stop climate change because people were overusing magic. protip: if you use the \n command, you can create custom victory quotes.

the game was horrid, but i enjoyed making it.
I swear I've seen this topic before...

I have a few.

The Last Mystic
Engine: RPG Maker XP
Intended Length: 60-100 hours
Actual Completed Length: About 5 hours

Hiding because it's long and lame.
Picture it. A world that was plagued by endless war between 4 large factions, where the 4-6 minor factions got caught in between (all of them named in the intro. The Warlords, the Shamans, the wizards the ninja thesamuraitheelves the-you get the picture. :( ). One faction opened up the gates to hell (Called the Abyss because I didn't like using the dreaded H word as I was just coming out of a super religious high school), demons invade, the default RPGmaker heroes from the original RMXP database all join together (one from each faction) and save the day, leading to an era of peace...until they die of old age and an evil empire took over (because they realized the world was going to go back to perpetual war and decided to nip it in the bud with a dictatorship).

500 years later, our shonen-joey-sue main character wakes up in his little secret village on the day he's supposed to be given the gift of "Land-linked elemental" magic. Surprise surprise, the empire invades, steals their magical crystal (one of the 3 keys to hell) kidnaps everyone except the 5 youngest members, who all get separated. Hero learns the elemental magic on his own and gets ALL the elements instead of the usual single element, and goes on a journey to take down the empire.

The main idea is that you visit EVERY main continent (there were 8), get told by angels early on that you must stop the empire from opening up hell to use it to scare the factions into not rebelling so they could all go to war again, and then try to gain footing with all the factions so you can overthrow the empire (complete with massive war sequence), and then go into hell itself and kill all the demons inside it.

And in the totally unbalanced and dumb combat system (so dumb that I had to "upgrade" the starting skill to something actually WORSE, because the starting skill was so useful (50% chance to blind the enemy) and cheap on MP (which curved upwards WAY too fast). My game design skills really sucked back then.

Party members included:
Our no-real-faults-aside-from-being-reckless 19 year old hero.

A redhead thief girl who the hero saves from execution despite knowing her for all of 4 seconds, who is actually the last of the real ninja bloodlines.

A grumpy 22 year old soldier who gets dragged into the war despite wanting none of it, and who not only has a phobia of Trolls (which isn't a phobia, anyone woudl be afraid of trolls if one troll kills your entire division), he also has an insane fiancee that was forced on him who is actually a snake monster who would, late in the game, kidnap his family and blackmail him with that, forcing the party to crash the wedding to save both the family AND him.

An elf who is just NOT convinced that the hero is the one who will save the world, and gets basically no further characterization.

A nasty, mean pirate and known killer who is the only person to invent and use guns, and is actually the prince of the sand continent, but he ran away before the empire killed his whole family, and he wants payback any way he can get it.

And did I mention there was a love/best friends system involved?

I finished the first (short) continent, and about half of the second one. And all this lameness I just posted? This is AFTER a dozen revisions. The original ideas and dialogue were absolutely horrendous and cliche ridden. :(



The Lost City of Hiera
Engine: RPG Maker XP
Intended Length: 15-20 hours
Actual Completed Length: About half an hour.

I'm probably going to get back to this one someday. Eventually. After I've run out of sudden new inspirations. I like the concept and the ideas inside it and I'm sure it would be great, but...I really don't want to have to remake the line-of-sight and patrols and bribing system all over again in VX ace.

This was actually the first thing I posted about on these forums, actually. Asking how best to kick the start off.

Essentially, a young man is on a hunt for a hidden "lost city" because his dad abandoned him for it, and he wants to beat his dad to it to rub it in his face. He ends up quickly hooking up with the old gang of thieves and plunderers that his dad ran away with. Turns out his dad is long dead. Hero just rolls with it and tries to hunt down the lost city with the gang.

Also of note, there's a SERIOUS undead problem in the world, but it's kinda just part of the way that world's afterlife works, and that influences the plot. There were supposed to be three continents and a "friendship" system among the 10 gang members, where you could learn their skills if you hung out with them enough.

Gameplaywise, you were supposed to be able to rob trade caravans on the world map, and evade guard patrols in town (or you'd have to bribe them to go away or fight them and turn ALL the guards hostile and hunting for you). I actually got a good deal of this system done, but...after getting used to how deep even vanilla VXAce can allow you to go, I can't stand RMXP anymore and I will never go back to it. Meaning I'd have to remake all those things. :(

Black Noise
Engine: RPG Maker VCX ace
Intended Length: 5-10 hours
Actual Completed Length: Just the base system and opening tutorial. >_>

This was a modern RPG set after an unspecified event turned everyone into mindless drones just going through life without thinking. The only ones not affected were those who were listening to music. The party of young guys would scavenge for supplies and bicker amongst themselves and other survivors in an attempt to survive and find out what had caused this unseen apocalypse. The catch is, that if one of them got too close to a "null" (one of the mindless drones just doing everyday things), the Null would freak out and turn violent, so there was a stealth mechanic too. And if someone didn't have their music on them...They'd turn into a Null as well. The main character had previously been one of those "nulls" affected, but had been saved from that state, quite shockingly.

What was it? A secret government plan to broadcast an audible signal that overwrote everyone's imaginations, turning them into pliable worker drones who didn't think for themselves.

Gameplay was supposed to be ATB, and depending on the battle music you chose, you'd get different short term buffs. Since the game was based on "Survival", ending battles as efficiently as possible was the key.

I didn't get too far before I eventually threw up my hands in despair because the game systems like the crafting system, skill system, equipment and everything else was just getting way too damn complicated so I shelved it indefinitely. I doubt I'll ever go back to it.

---
I also had a short lived horror game in mind, but battles would have gotten rid of a lot of the horror, and honestly, it would have been WAY too complicated and dumb. :(
Weird... I always assumed that was a large bow holding up her ponytail and not rabbit ears... ^.^

Also, I want to hit things as Edgeworth! OBJECTION!


I'm in the same boat as Craze - if I started putting up details about games that never came to be, the thread would be miles long.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
omg it really is a bow in his/her hair

wow
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
You only thought you were making a furry game

now your precious memories have been shattered as lies

will you make a new one using the playboy bunny waitress sprite as the male protagonist?
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
lockez you know me too well.
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