Games that now exist only in the abyss… forgotten, abandoned, their existence wiped clean from the face of the Earth.
Working Title.
What it Was.
How Far I Got.
What went wrong.
Best Part.
Worst Part.
My First Game
The Misadventures of Sir Axem Helmsley.
Adventure platformer with hammer throwing & brick-breaking mechanics with various types of blocks.
First stage.
Bad feedback, ran out of ideas.
Sound effects were made by my mouth into a low-fi microphone.
I made the music myself in Anvil Studio.
…anyone wanna play?
The winner will be decided by a vote.
Winner will receive the tears of a unicorn.
Sounds interesting. That part about making the sounds is great. ha ha! I make a lot of sound FX that way as well. Dabbled with making music that way too.
this was a game I made up as a kid to play with my family.
Extra Chromosomes
You go around the table bouncing a ball into a cup. If you miss you put a napkin in your mouth. the napkins are the chromosomes.
We only ever played it once and the game ended when my mom wet her pants from laughing too hard.
I think its the kind of game you can only play once.
It’s pretty funny seeing everyone with several wads of napkins in there mouth. I think one of us ended up with 20.
stuffing napkins in you mouth turned out to not be very much fun. It had this weird affect that made you drool on yourself.
Man, there’s lots of board game competitions for party games. You should package this up & pitch it to some people. I can envision lots & lots of drunk people playing this with drool running down their chin, snot running from their nose, tears from their eyes &, if they’re drunk enough, a big wet stain forming in their lap & a puddle at their feet.
What It Was: An entry for the Escapist’s “Stonking Great Game” contest, all the way back in 2009, themed after the popular web-show “Zero Punctuation”
How Far I Got: Technically, 100%. I had a playable version that was submitted, and it had a beginning, middle and end. But if I’m being honest, I would say only 30% of it was properly finished. Which effortly brings us to the next category…
What Went Wrong: Over-ambition. The common bane of the beginner. And I was very much a beginner for this one. While I had dappled in a little modding and had plenty of experience in game-art creation, this was the first title I had ever programmed on my own. I had only started programming in earnest about a year prior to making this game, so it is my first proper title. (humble though it may be)
Best Part: The art. While I did not rank even in the top three for this contest, I was very confident in the art resources I produced. Most comments on the game praised how stable it was, and how polished the assets for it were. While I was working from a clear and obvious source, all of the actual art assets were custom creations of my own making. I put a lot of effort into making sure that the game looked right, and ran smoothly. In particular, the animations I created for the game were consistently praised.
Worst Part: The gameplay. This is where the over-ambition I mentioned earlier really shot me in the kneecaps. My original idea was to have the game’s menu be a spoof off of Mega-Man’s boss-select screen, and have each different “level” be a spoof off of a game genre. Spoofing games seemed appropriate, given the nature of the contest, and the show we were working from. But developing multiple game-types turned out to be a terrible idea, and far too ambitious for a contest with a hard month-and-half deadline. I managed to crank out three, which was impressive in its own right. But by not focusing on one I weakened the implementation of all. I also had to scrap the game select screen in favor of a more linear experience, which made experiencing the whole game a little more onerous, and less fun. Picking one gameplay style and focusing on polishing and improving just that would have been a much better approach.
Working Title: Heroica Legends
What it Was: A 3rd person MORPG set in a cute micro-world.
How Far I Got: Pre-Alpha
What went wrong: Heroica’s a licensed theme, and I needed cash. [:P]
Best Part: Spawning a player into the network for the first time after successfully connecting. Good times, good times…
Worst Part: The subsequent bugs that we’re due to my newbie coding skills. [:P]
I think I actually put it up on the internet somewhere, but it’s only partially playable because of Google changing its spreadsheet API.
I like it so far… it takes guts to talk about past failures, but you also learn something by not just sweeping it under the rug and hoping nobody ever finds out about it.
I’m not certain that the Nietzsche quote is really on-point for this subject. My past work isn’t an abyss. It’s just a little dated/embarrassing. That’s all. It’s not some corrupting influence, which is kind of the point of the Nietzsche quote.
I do feel that it is important to be able to look at your past work with as much dispassion as you can muster, in order to learn from your past mistakes and improve your future efforts. Being able to judge your own work honestly is an essential skill for any artist or craftsman. All of the best creatives are their own most severe critics, never fully satisfied with the work they’ve done. Constantly attempting to learn from what they did and refine their work going forward.
I haven’t made it to a polishing state on a project in years.
I did make a simple Christmas game in Unity a couple years or so ago and released it on Kongregate. Overall I am happy with it. Not that I think it is an awesome perfect game. It was never intended to be. If it had I would have spent a lot longer working on it. But it serves its purpose. Providing something different. A few minutes of Christmas-themed non-killing play for those looking for such a thing.
I have a mouse shooter Operation Wolf style I worked on when first learning Unity. It actually uses the Animator and most Unity specific stuff. I learned a lot what I did and did not like about Unity with that project. Next I worked on a platform game project experimenting with different ways to communicate between the game objects and throwing out some of the Unity specific methods. That took me another good step forward toward a better development approach in Unity. Then I worked on another 2D project in Unity. A side-scrolling shmup. That one benefited from the other work as well and I focused again on architecture in my Unity game projects. Collisions, communication and so forth. I also worked on a simple non-scrolling shmup at some point. That was another attempt to not make a mess of a Unity game project that succeeded on some bits and failed on others.
Finally I worked on a 2D underwater action adventure game in Unity. That was making good progress compared to the others. It was then I decided to investigate other options for 2D game dev and switched to Monkey X. My two projects in MX are very early on and will be revisited later this year. Finally, now I am able to focus more on the actual game design and implementation than wrestling with technical bits. So we’ll see how that goes.
So it depends on what a person is looking at really. Some will see failure and some will see success. Just depends on the goal. The vast majority of my game dev work has focused on creating workflows and patterns to maximize productivity far more than actually creating a game.
That has changed only recently so we’ll see how that turns out.
WHAT IT WAS
My first iteration of Blood, Sweat, Gold. A mix of FTL + XCOM.
HOW FAR I GOT
Pretty far. I got to a pretty solid alpha, then rewrote the strategy layer and got that to an alpha.
WHAT WENT WRONG
At the end of the day, it wasn’t really a fun or compelling experience. I’m still not certain as to why, but I think it came down to that the exploration map, encounters and tactical didn’t work together very well. Because the timing and presentation of each of these parts was awkward, it made it content feel too repetitive too fast.
Because the player burned through content so quickly, I would have had to build out an absolutely endless amount of content in order to give a good experience. Although maybe, I could have handled making a bunch of content, the content itself would have become so mind numbingly repetitive that it would have, likely, been a fools errand.
BEST PART
The best part is that I learned a huge amount about my strengths and weaknesses as a game designer, and about the challenges of making mid sized games.
I think that, unless it’s really really fun, a gamedev will always grow to slightly hate his/her game. [:P] I haven’t gotten that with Tidal Fall, actually, even playing the current levels for fun in my downtime. So that’s actually some pretty great motivation for me! [] [:P]
I think that, if the process takes long enough you can even hate on a really great game. There’s also weird stuff where like you wish everything was better and all you see are flaws after a while, even when it’s actually very good.
There’s a polygon interview with Jake Solomon about the development of XCOM. This is a great game for sure, but you can tell that after the release of it - he still had a really troubled relationship with the game. After a 4-5 year development cycle and many mistakes and bumps on the road, I can definitely understand why.
] [:P]