POST YOUR DEAD PROJECTS!

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post=125369
Is this a "look how cool I am, even my abandoned projects look great" or a "look how dumb I am, I put a lot of effort into a potentially great game and then I abandon it" topic?
Yes!
No it's the "its fun to reminiscence about games you never completed because that's all they're good for now so shut up" topic :D
post=125371
No it's the "its fun to reminiscence about games you never completed because that's all they're good for now so shut up" topic :D


And that cancelled games are also product of failed team effort because of ambitiousness for some people's cases.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
Besides the obvious* I have never actually cancelled a game that got beyond the "conception/gestation" stage. Well, okay, that is a lie. Here are games that are actually cancelled after some signifciant amount of work. The years are rough approximations and this is probably not a complete list:

Chronicles of Thorn (RM2k; Unreleased; 2001)

First serious project I ever developed, longstanding universe I've had that has never seen any finished products. Even a D&D game I ran set there didn't last more than a few sessions. I sometimes think it's cursed. Anyway the premise is that in a fantasy setting with a sentient, living planet (and hence sentient, living flora) industrial development gets to the point where the plants feel they are in danger and reach out to protect themselves by slaughtering humans. The only way humanity can think to stop them is a drastic magic ritual which creates essentially nuclear winter. The result is a snow-covered and dying world with killer plants. I got about twenty five maps in before I realized I knew nothing about RM2k and should rethink doing something this ambitious. Actually that's a lie...I got another idea that was even more ambitious (see below).

(Screenshot unavailable.)

Brother's War (2001? RM2k; Unreleased)

I don't remember much about this except that it was made at about the same time as Fires of Freedom, that it was the closest thing I've made to a "Traditional" game, and that I stopped working it when I ran into an (at-the-time) uncircumventable, unexplainable bug while in the last stages of crafting a far-reaching overly ambitious semi-interactive cutscene which was kind of like medieval storming of normandy beach meets the dollet invasion from FF8.

(Screenshot unavailable.)

Fires of Freedom (RM2k; Unreleased; 2001)

The premise is that it is the year 20xx (oh shit, it is the year 20xx right now technically) and basically America has been subsidized corporations so much that essentially IS a corporation, managed by a board of directors overtly for promise. You are a terrorist/freedom fighter and you wage a second American Revolution. Highly political ironically, although pre-Bush. This was adapted from an RPG Maker (PS1) game that I finished and I have sense attempted to adapt it into several pre-game media with little success.

(Screenshot unavailable.)

Moment of Truth (RM2k; 2002; Demo)

Arguably my first overhyped project. I don't even remember the plot. A lot of the gameplay ideas got rolled into "The Tower". I think the mapping was pretty good for me and for the time...which is to say still probably quite bad.

The Tower/Excelsior (RM2k; 2002)

This is the first project I made that met with any success. Characteristic "eye bigger than your stomach" ambition for me. There were supposed to be two campaigns, one where you play as an apprentice necromancer and another where you play as a crusader-like knight sent to stop the necromancer's master. I only got part way into the first campaign with the demo I released but it was well received. It had a Magic the Gathering style CBS for one battle and was DBS for the rest. My first (and last) attempt at coding a CBS, no matter how limited.

Excelsior was the even larger, more ambitious game it was supposed to evolve into.

*Set in the same world as Chronicles of Thorn only years earlier.

I really SHOULD have a screenshot for this....I wonder why I don't...I just spent almost an hour spelunking the internet for one with no result. Frustration.

Immortal Hunger (RM2k3 2003; Never Released?)

A vampire game. A dark medieval vampire game where you play as a vampire. I don't know, people, nothing to see here.

*Set in the same world as The Tower only oceans away.

(Screenshot unavailable)

Penumbra (RM2k(3?) 2003; Never Released?)

This was supposed to be like an adventure game where you are in an apartment and then the end of the world happens in a really biblical, surreal and low-key way and everything goes slowly monotone as color and life drains from the room and you have to explore the lives of your fellow survivors and neighbors as you struggle to survive. The plan was to play with screen tone as a gimmick to denote important narrative facts and to present a very seamless narrative experience with minimal menus.

The Shallow Sea (RMXP, 2005)

This was the first (and not the last) game I made where you can choose from four classes. You can do the same thing in Mage Duel and Everything Turns Gray. This was based equally on Stardust by Neil Gaiman and a LARP I was playing at the time which, in hindsight, wasn't very good. Like most cancelled projects, I got about ~100 hours of development and one hour of gameplay in.



Shadowrun: Missions (RM2k3 2006-2008?? Released on RMN)

A Shadowrun fan game. This one you all should know about.



The following projects are still "in limbo" neither cancelled nor in active development.
Everything Turns Grey
Mage Duel (*Set in the same world as The Tower at an unspecified time and place.)
Backstage 2
Between Two Worlds (*Set in the same world as The Tower at the same time on another continent.)
Eldritch
Ruptured Souls
Both Starseed Games

Maybe none of these will be finished, maybe all of these will be finished, more likely something in between.

*"The Obvious" (For the Very Slow)

I totally have The Tower and Immortal Hunger.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
Having The Tower is pretty common...it was a popular game back in the day.

I am VERY impressed that you have Immortal Hunger.

By the way, even I don't have about 1/2 of these games.
@calunio: Well, I thought nobody ever really talks about the projects they abandoned so I thought it might be fun to see which projects were too ambitious for people, what hard drive crashes killed and also how far most of us came since earlier projects. I'm not trying to advertise or pimp my projects or anything.

Darken's got it right... We spent some amount of time on these games so why not reminisce about them?

@Shinan: I play W40k and I love zombies so I would have loved to see yours completed. Consequently, I was hoping this topic might encourage some of us to pick up old dead projects after sitting down and discussing them for a bit.

@Max: That's pretty cool how you can still find playable versions of your dead games. All I have left of mine are screenshots. Maybe I should keep an archive of everything I do. Consequently, I enjoyed what you had in Ruptured Souls, will you be working on any more of that?
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
I only had one or two games that I've cancelled so far, but a lot that simply failed to reach any popularity.

Tales of Larduous
Platform: MMF 1.5
After learning about game design through some summer camp, I was inspired to purchase Multi Media Fusion to make a compilation of three games: A platform shooter, a Regular Platformer, and a Top-down 2-player shooter. The results were damn bad, especially now that I look at them.

The shooting project was named "Shooterman", and it involved a kid with a gray, Megaman-esque outfit trying to save his girlfriend from the evil scientist Dr. Stewie. The levels involved fighting one, predictable-moving boss, and there was a bug were the shots you fired would change direction upon changing the player's direction... So you could use telekinesis to kind of control your bullet shots. It was damn easy, too.

The platformer was called Pooyee, and it was another girlfriend-saving story involving a blue, armless blob and a human girl with barely anything on. You could not jump on enemies, I couldn't figure out how to do that with MMF, and the difficulty of the last two levels can be bullshitty. I also thought it was a great idea for Pooyee to walk on water as oppose to dying, sort of as a "hidden cheat" for the game... >_>

Last was Shooter Showdown, a two-player game with no AI... Need I say more? Also with an imperfect attempt to replicate Bomberman, it was hard to move around. Upon playing it with a person, I found out that this was the most buggiest game I've created.


Platform Bomber
Another MMF game I started back in my game development n00b days. I was basically Bomberman only without the top-down view... and no powerups. The game is pretty slow-paced and the first boss is almost impossible to defeat. I even developed MS paint-quality artwork and a help file, but in the end I just got tired of it.

Bubble Attack
The second complete MMF project. It was a short, arcade-styled game which involved you avoiding bubbles. I wanted a highscore for this but I didn't know how to implement it like other people have.


Slimy the Sahagin
My first completed game for RPG Maker. It was basically a beginning RTP project, and after seeing that many main heroes were scraggly-haired pretty boys, I chose to make mine one of the monsters. :D
... The game had bad balancing, the dialog is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, the mapping poor, and the characters didn't have that much personality to them.


The Secret of Ludia
I think some of you are already familiar with this, you could just go to my game page to see the details on that. PS: the humor in that game is childish enough to make me cringe a little.

Memories of a Ghost
This was my first VX project, and would have been the first game that I made with a dark storyline (I'm typically into light-heartedness or the balanced ones that aren't too goofy nor too dark). I kind of abandoned it for no real reason. It's just that other projects, like Tina of the Stars, kind of came up and I had more interest developing that as oppose to this, even though I still think I was getting somewhere with this project


The Best Game EVER!!
This was to be a joke project parodying all the crappy, dysfunctional crossover games that are made by RM n00bs on a daily basis, the goal being was to make a pile of shit that would end all the other shits! The story was basically that a villain named Evil Deershit (like the name? :P) and his henchmen corrupted the planet crystal, which transforms the stable planet of Urth into Evil Deershit World, a world filled with several evils like bad mapping and clashing sprite graphics, and it's up to Naruto, Sonic the Hedgehog, Inuyasha, and the Dragon Quest Slime to stop him. Like Memories of a Ghost, I kind of stopped working on it without true intention due to distractions, the game probably wouldn't have been that awesome anyway...


Blue Man Dan
One of my first completed RM2k3 games. It's about a blue-faced warrior who crash-lands on planet Whadafuk to save Shikoku island from an army of bees... Maybe that's why it wasn't so popular. It also got a pretty bad review on one of the sites I posted in, and now I can kind of understand why. The story was okay, but the game play sucked balls.
WAH HOHOHO!!
MY TESTICLES ARE TINGLING WITH EXCITMENT!
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
I fuckin' knew someone was going to quote that D:
Pretty much this on top of a pile of random gadgets and prototypes I made:

http://rpgmaker.net/games/1662/
tardis
is it too late for ironhide facepalm
308
I personally like "90GEE!!"
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
D_G: No plans for finishing Ruptured Souls as of now.
Awww... I loved the choices system you had in cutscenes. It made even opening and closing doors tense as you didn't know what consequence your choice was gonna have.

Personally I enjoyed it much better than Backstage.
post=125407
@calunio: Well, I thought nobody ever really talks about the projects they abandoned so I thought it might be fun to see which projects were too ambitious for people, what hard drive crashes killed and also how far most of us came since earlier projects. I'm not trying to advertise or pimp my projects or anything.

Darken's got it right... We spent some amount of time on these games so why not reminisce about them?


Why not finish them? What I said, I meant as a compliment. I think it's such a waste of potentially good games.
Complete Chaos was dead, but then I revived it a year or so later. I really, really felt that I (and the game) both needed time apart. MMZ is definitely dead, however (just kidding!).

All of my old projects died along with my old hard-drive. The two games I'm working on now are both alive and well.
Well, generally I do try to finish projects in some form (like how One Night Isolation became The Beyond) but I have lost games to hard drive crashes before and all I have left now are screens I've managed to find on my old photobucket.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
post=125419
Awww... I loved the choices system you had in cutscenes. It made even opening and closing doors tense as you didn't know what consequence your choice was gonna have.

Personally I enjoyed it much better than Backstage.


So I gathered from your review(s).
Consequently I enjoyed what I saw of Backstage 2 better than Backstage. No hard feelings Max, I liked its story but for some reason I just couldn't enjoy the gameplay. Personally I did enjoy playing it for the story but story is only half the game.
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