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[Ky.]

Hilariously depressing...

A very high volume of my projects never saw the chance to get a half decent screenshot, as I'd give up in the middle of getting to that point.  But here goes:
 
EdgeDM
My first major project, was a mod for Half Life 2 DM. The day the SDK was released for it, I gathered some friends together, and we set out to recreate Quake2 multiplayer experience, powered by Source. We got decently far, got a couple maps in there, got some WIP screenshots, even got a April Fools "release" (the only "release" lol) in there, where you only got one weapon in one little map, affectionately referred to as "The Meat Gun" (I was cool BEFORE Lady Gaga, ok?).

Anyways, we got a LOT of Quake in there, including Rocket Jumping and Smoke Trails as you launched grenades out of the grenade launcher.  I did all the modelling and animation for the weapons, and my team did a fantastic job at recreating some classic Quake2 maps.

Then I got an email from Todd Hollenshead, then CEO of Id Software telling me to cease and desist. This immediately frightened off 40% of my team as I went back and fourth with the guy to work something out.  In the end, Hollenshead said he'd be ok with some minor changes to the branding on our side, and he'd allow us to continue doing what we're doing.

...[long email]...

However, if you're doing original deathmatch maps for your
own mod, and not using any property of id Software, Inc., then you should
be okay as far as I'm concerned.
 
Regards,
 
tsh

Even though Todd allowed us to continue our efforts, the damage was already done. Those who already left, REALLY left (deleted accounts and everything) and quickly the rest went about their own way too.

A harddrive malfunction on my programmers computer erased all the source code, leaving just me, who only had some models and textures (this was well before we used Subversioning). That put the nail in the coffin.



First Priority
In the wake of EdgeDM, my very good friend (the programmer) and I parted ways for a bit to go and lick our respective wounds. It would be I think about a year before we got back together, to try and do something else. At this point, he was frustrated with the Source engine, and wanted to do something custom. He'd gone away to better his programming skills, so he can write his own engines. 
However, being the noobs we both were, I insisted that at the very least (in an effort to make his life a little bit easier) we use an existing rendering engine, and we can build the rest of the pieces.  At that time, Ogre3D was the best looking rendering engine around and it was free. So we picked that up.

He hated using it from moment 1.

But we persisted. Got an Ogre window up, got a grid system going, got model loading working (our own model format, not Ogres) and then effectivly his hatred of using Ogre's API got the better of us, and we petered the project.

First Priority was an amazingly ambitious idea, and one that im still hanging onto (which is why im being vague about what it was) in a hope that one day, I can bring it to some kind of life, on my own.

No screenshots exist for it.


Invasion of Everything
At this point, I was still naively trying to be a games animator. Thats what I went to college for, and thats effectively all I was trying to get at to do with all these game projects: I wanted to see my animations, come to life in real time game software.

Unity2 was released.

So I downloaded it and gave it a go, and very impressed was I! I knew Javascript from my days of Web Development and I was used to Flash and Actionscript, so picking up Unity was no problem to me. Again, all I wanted to do, was animate some models, and see them played out in-game.

So I wrote this treatment around a multiplayer Horde mode like Survival game against invisible aliens that would animate/possess in-animate objects.

I got to animate a generic soldier dude (place-holder character) and got to control him around with a third person camera around a very tiny little test map to work out movement collisions.

It was at this point, that I realized; I should really learn to program games better. If I want to make any of my ideas come to reality, I need to learn to program. At least in such a way I can contribute to the principle programmer to keep the ball rolling.

This game was scrapped, because I simply lost interest in Unity, and sought to drag myself through the mud: I needed to learn how to write an engine.


A Friendly Game of Russian Roulette
A big part of my influence to make content for the internet to consume at large, came from Tom Fulp and Newgrounds.com. Here was this guy, who could write amazing (at the time) Flash games for his website, for fun.  There was a really early entry to his site, known as "Rock Paper Scissors Roulette" that featured his trademark mascot Pico and his friends, against the Uberkid clones.
The gameplay was simple: you chose, Rock, Paper, or Scissors. The AI opponent would randomly choose their option. If you tied, youd try again, and youd keep going until there was a winner. The loser would have to have a go at the revolver. If the character survived, you kept going until one of you dies.  Once one dies, the next in line takes the hot seat. There were three of you.
It is a SUPER simple implementation on how to innovate on what is (without the danger of it) a very very boring chance game, with ever decreasing odds.

Russian Roulette is, for some reason, one of those "games" that fascinates me. I'd never play it myself unless Nerf releases a revolver that doesnt make it obvious which chamber has a dart in it.  But that's besides the point.  Russian Roulette itself, is a very easy game to understand.  You go around the table, until someone dies. Simple as that.

Programming something like that couldnt be easier right?

WELL.  Yeah. Programming the chance part, the moment the trigger is pulled, is easy. What I didn't account for (because im no longer working in Flash or Unity) was the programming involved of every other aspect of the game. The setup, the characters, the weapon, the parameters, the art, the art implementation, etc. The list just kept on going, and I got immediately overwhelmed.

So instead, I opted to use an engine instead. For this I chose Torque3D, mostly because it was open source, and hey, TorqueScript, I know how to script!

Turns out, scripting for a 3D ended up being a bit more than I bargained for.

So some time into it, and not getting very far, the next thing happens:



Raging Flight
This one was personal, and a bit of a jab in the ribs of a friend of ours. We all started with making games in Flash, trying to one up one-another in any way we can. At the time, McFretN had just released Combat Instinct 2 on the Newgrounds, and it was all the rage. Everyone wanted in on the FPS in Flash pie, including us. 
Our friends flavour of this craze, was known as Raging Flight, and was popular enough that it enticed him to spawn a sequel. Both were fairly successful.

So quite a bit of time went by since we shelved First Priority, when my friend and I we're chatting it up again, working on our own respective projects now (read: Russian Roulette above), talked about teaming up once again to finally create something we could release. He wanted to do some kind of Starfox like thing, so we both effectively settled on Raging Flight so we can bring it up to our friend one day and be all "lol look at this". This time, no bullshitting around, we knew it had to be a custom engine. We called it the Nebhos Engine and we both contributed to the code this time, and we effectively got a really nice looking and feeling Starfox clone. The only major hurtle we hit was: how were we going to create the levels.  This was a major concern because we hadn't agreed upon what should be making the levels, how they should work, and everything involved in the gameplay. 
It was really at this point in our partnership that things became very clear to us: he just wanted to make the engine, it was I that was supposed to do gameplay. And simply, I wasn't prepared yet for that kind of responsibility. I was still very green to game programming overall, and I had no idea what to do or how to start.

Because I wasn't totally prepared for what it was that I had to do, the project fell by the wayside. 





The Future
Nebhos was a great idea with a great implementation. But I'm just not a C guy. Our programming styles simply didn't match.  it was at this point that I got hired at EA (as a website developer) for a contract extending out to a year. I needed this job, as I had a wife and now a kid on the way, and needed to kickstart my career.

Well apparently when working for a company that develops and publishes content for a vast majority of platforms, they want to protect their assets. What that means is: I wasn't allowed to try and make games anymore.

Throughout that year, my friend and I started talking about teaming up once more, but first, I couldn't be working at EA. So I took the time, and abused the shit out of my privileges to EA's Information Resource Center (hundreds of thousands of books and training material for Programming and Art) and their archives to start reading up on and studying engine architecture and programming practices.

When i was informed my contract wasn't getting extended and I'd be without job, that's when we knew. My contract was expiring a couple days before the 2014 Cyberpunk Game Jam was starting.  And we decided that'd be our best chance at finally crafting something.

Looking back at our past together, it became overtly clear we had different styles. We enjoyed working together a lot (why do you think we kept getting back together?) but some ground understandings needed to be established.  There is nothing wrong with C, his preferred language, but it doesn't accommodate my programming style at all. But he didn't want to do C++ either for his own reasons (and honestly, I was fine with that). He then told me there was this language he'd been meaning to try, he'd been salivating over for quite a while and been meaning to get into, and told me that it's a language that I actually might really enjoy writing in.

That language was D.

So it was set. We knew what we needed to do.  We got our dependencies in order, we got our established roles and responsibilities laid out, and we had a game plan. We just needed the Jam's Theme to be announced.


And thus it was.


The jam came and went, we did an amazing amount of work in the timespan provided. But in the end, writing a game engine from scratch is a huge undertaking. One that we weren't not prepared for mind you, but real life has a way of dealing with you. In my life, I have a wife and infant daughter, and at the time I was still looking for work, which reduced my involvement a lot more than I anticipated.

But here's the thing: We liked our idea, and we made enough progress, that we finally hit that mark where we were starting to see things come to life.  Our little project, now affectionately referred to as "Corrode" is a real game. It's got graphics, it's got gameplay, it's got a private design wiki behind it (collaborative ideas), its powered by an engine we enjoy working with, it's basically everything we'd been working towards over the years.

Corrode doesn't have any screenshots yet, I'm waiting to polish up the first level before revealing what it even looks like.  But wow. What a trip it's been so far.

[RalenHlaalo]

I still intend to finish this some day.

[He-Who-Develops-Games]

I have quite a list of unfinished games to dump here in the "graveyard", haha.
Let's begin, shall we? Apologies in advance for the bloody huge images.
Mortis is a game (I use that term loosely) that I made to help me learn love.physics. It was one of two of such self-teaching games. Anyway, Mortis is a small platform-y thing in which there are little blocks of death in random locations and when you touch em, a corpse appears and you respawn. I also used it to learn particles in Love2D, hence the bloodsprays.



I Hate You, Please Die in a Fire! was going to be a weird game that was basically Warioware plus boss fights (and the minigames were a bit longer) I took a screenshot of the code because, well, it never ended up working very well (despite the ~1.5k lines of Python I wrote for the bloody thing being pretty damn good code) and its failure is the reason I switched to Love2D.


Futuis Eam is a weird platformer sandbox-y thing I used to learn Love2D *and* love.physics. Basically, the gravity, block positions, and other parameters of the room change every second. It's surprisingly addictive.


Dry Erase is my greatest failure. It's the game I went into indie dev to create but later realised that I could never accomplish what I wanted. Its level editor was absolute shit (especially compared to the editors I write now for Havoc and other projects) and I'm not at all a good level designer or pixel artist.


Finally, Ascend was going to be a dungeon crawler, and was going to be my primary project after I (temporarily) left Havoc to my friend's maintenance. For an alpha it's really not all that bad, to be honest. If I had a few hours that I felt like dedicating to creating a full dungeon with the incredible editor I wrote for it, I could probably release it as a relatively decent game. However, I grew bored of developing it as time went on. The music for this game fucking ruled, if only due to my history as an ambient musician, but the graphics were awful because I'm not exactly great at pixel art.


Here's to hoping no other projects end up here, eh?

[Thewaether]

Fans of old scrap may be pleased to hear I put almost everything I've made and never completed into two packs. They're free, obviously.
2013
2014

[Woodledude]

Hello, everyone. I'm not really notable around here, and my sole claim to fame is my various abandoned projects around the internet. That being said, I'd like to share with you all one of the more private projects I'm both most proud and most ashamed of. A 2d multiplayer arena shooter, where you build your own character.

The project itself is something I had drawn up some concept art for at least a year or two before I actually "started" the project. It had several different resurgences, and eventually, I found a programming friend who took interest in the project, and agreed to build an engine for me, and so on. I promised that if he did that, he would get a cut of the profits. And so it goes - He started working on the engine, and I started planning, creating art I intended to be used as game assets and figuring out the different systems. It seemed like it was all going swimmingly.

Unfortunately, it really wasn't. Programming friend was also maintaining both a stressful job with long hours and a relationship, and months in, with the engine half-ready for the first prototype and progress slowing, he decided that "facebook was too stressful". Without an easy way to talk to him, I... Slowly gave up on him programming for the project, which essentially shot it through the heart.

It's been in my cruel little cryostasis ever since, as I keep the art I made as part trophy, and part gravestone. I've gone back and picked the whole thing apart in my head a dozen times, slowly coming to terms with the fact that really, it was poorly executed and doomed from the start - Not only did he not really have the time, I kept adding onto that stress, because I wanted far too much both out of him and out of the project. That being said, I still think the core concepts could be salvaged, and maybe even some of the art I made. And the whole experience was valuable for all the lessons it taught me.

Now, concept art! Where do I begin...

Well, I suppose I can start with a staple. Above is the Soldier design - I had different classes for them, that I called "Archetypes". See, the thing is, you were supposed to be able to build them, these characters you control. They have all these individual parts, that each have a different function - Those yellow pieces that look like they have magnets on them, for instance. Those I called "Limb Controllers," and basically the idea was that they would allow the Vyrot to swing around separated assemblies via quantum locking, which is basically an advanced version of magnetic levitation (that actually exists!). Yeah... You can see where this gets complicated fast. I still really like the idea, but I'm very partial to fiddly things and engineering and what have you. Which was the idea of the archetypes - They were supposed to be the initial set of blueprints that people could use right off the bat to get into the action, without having to go through building their own until they felt comfortable.

Anyway, I don't want to bog you guys down in all the minutia unless you all ask for it. I could probably dedicate a thread to all the little pieces and bits I had and still have in my head about this game. I... Almost did, actually, but then I found this thread. Anyway, onto the next one! One of my favorites, actually.

The Pilot. This guy was meant to crawl into tight spaces, and sit in tiny cockpits to operate vehicles, such as aircraft. I actually have a couple, it's just that the one I would want to show you is big. Like twice-the-size-of-the-screen-at-this-scale big. You can also see my experimentation with the decal system I had planned, including a wacky paint job I had in mind for a sporting event.

... And you didn't believe me when I said I wanted far too much out of the project.



Anyway, I'll wrap up here with a favorite of my girlfriend, the Observation Drone; AKA "Little OD". He's smaller than the others because his CPU is smaller - He's only supposed to follow orders, not think independently. Basically, the idea behind this guy was that he would act like a Ward in DotA, except that you could tell him to move around or just wander the map. Also, he's friggin adorable. I mean, look at him!

Alright, that's it. Love to hear your guy's feedback, even if the project is more or less as dead as a rock with a bit of algae on it.

[SeanNoonan]

Two of mine that are on permanent hold...

SKIN

A cyberpunk stealth action game where you must piece together the story by finding memory chips you'd hidden away before wiping your own memory clean. The world was meant to focus on human tissue and skin as an economy in a world run by humans that are "more machine than man", whom are interested in gaining new flesh to graft to their own rotting bodies.



Level wise, not much exists other than the hospital and a small street scene. Mechanic wise, there was a conversation system, walking, running, basic shooting, world interaction and item use. Not all a waste though as I reused a lot of the functionality in: Boreocracy

WLBTF

...or "What Lies Beneath The Farm" was supposed to be a procedurally generated platformer inspired by Spelunky and Rogue Legacy, though I was choosing not to go the permadeath route.





The premise was to have the player define their own levels through the game's own gameplay ingredients. I had a really solid plan for this, but I think the genre is a little played out now, and it would be quite an undertaking for me to pull off on my own as the game required a lot of assets and some quite complex code/scripting, and I'm still new to this solo gamedev business.


Like I said, I consider these on perma-hold, rather than completely dead, but with the amount of projects I've been taking on lately, it's unlikely I'll have the time to go back.
Thanks for reading 

[Sgt. Pepper]

[derail]

...So this is where all games go to die.... *shudder*...

[/derail]

[diegzumillo]

This was my first game prototype I made when learning to use Unity,
I've always wanted to make a car game. 
Crashing cars never gets old
Webplayer; https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/69315779/raahenreissu/raahenreissu.html

I never came to this thread before, I don't know why. This is so cool! The only thing that bothers me is that the camera follows the ragdoll and I can't drive more than 10 seconds until he's ejected from the car. But driving on the walls is awesome fun. You should continue making this.

I'm going to drop a link too. This is a game I want to make eventually but I just had to get this prototype out of my system, it was driving me insane. It's a flight sim/game. Play it here.

[Uber]

Placeholder
Placeholder was planned to be a simple platformer with a twist - on each stage, you had a limited amount of platforms you could place, in order to advance. I lost hope in the project, and didn't even complete two stages.
(Image too large, available at http://i.imgur.com/SsVPhUA.png)
Hotel Resort
Hotel Resort, aka code hell.
This game was a hotel resort themed game inspired loosely by Leisure Suit Larry 6.. Although I had minimal programming experience at the time, so it was more like taking a walk through a resort, but you're forced to walk a boring path.
No screenshot available, but here's an example..

Code:

Welcome to the diner!
We're closed, so get out.
Press enter

Now entering room 2...
Press enter

Looking at these, people are way better than me at making games, but these are some of my earlier works I suppose, and I hope to learn from my mistakes.

[Raku]

http://www.mediafire.com/download/nndcka9slkkrzow/Down_School.zip

Im not sure if I consider this unfinished or a demo, but it's very small, and I dont plan on working on it any more. Started work on it 3 days ago in Gamemaker 8.0pro and it's my first 3d endeavor. Simple little Silent Hill 1 inspired first person exploration game. Happy Halloween

[absolute8]

http://www.mediafire.com/download/nndcka9slkkrzow/Down_School.zip

Im not sure if I consider this unfinished or a demo, but it's very small, and I dont plan on working on it any more. Started work on it 3 days ago in Gamemaker 8.0pro and it's my first 3d endeavor. Simple little Silent Hill 1 inspired first person exploration game. Happy Halloween

Why u no plan on working anymore? This looks really good.

[Raku]

ah, because I finished it! I couldnt think of any more to do in it and made a stopping point. Thank you though!

[Armageddon]

I loved it.

[DifferentName]

Here's an unfinished game I worked on mostly back in 2007 or so.


http://differentname.net/random/AsteroidMiner2.html

In my original Asteroid Miner flash game, you just dodged asteroids and picked up little green rocks for points and health. I didn't make a gun for it, because at the time I wasn't sure how to keep track of objects in a way that bullets could hit test against asteroids.

For Asteroid Miner 2, I added guns, some enemies, and planned to make an epic game with a wide variety of enemies, boss fights, and upgrades, over multiple levels. I like the parts that I finished, but I didn't have the discipline to follow through. I'd still like to come back to Asteroid Miner with a full story, but when I do it won't be built off this old flash version.

[Skeledork]

Made this shit in 2013 - 2014. It was basically an engine and prototype that would later be stollen by a ukranian

[RealityShifter]

I was going through some of my old prototypes. Seeing Noct actually reminded me of one of my favorite prototypes from 2008.



This is when I started to get the hang of pathfinding, I also have a line of sight system working pretty well. You can kind of notice the creatures will fade out over a couple seconds when they are behind a wall in the gif.

There was a lighting system in place which really pulled the aesthetic together, but I could not get the extension working and had many other prototypes to dig into so I made a couple gifs as is and moved on.

I do plan on revisiting this concept once Butt Sniffin Pugs is well under way. I really enjoyed working on these mechanics.

[TGHoly]

Metaloid Origin: Alpha Demo





[Control]
- Arrow Key = Move
- Forward x2 = Splint [Jump after splint allow character jump longer]
- Z = Shoot [Hold the key for Auto fire]
- X = Jump [Press Down+Jump allow Character drop from some platform]
- C = Use special power
- Q = Weapon Switch



[Introduce]
Me and my friend work on this game and manage to release Alpha demo last year sadly not many know about it. Metaloid Origin is linear level base platformer/shooter inside from Gunstar Heroes , Turrican [my first is big fan of this game] and Megaman Combine together you can play slow or fast as you want.

In this demo have 2 levels you might found some bug/glitch and balance issue but at least the game really playable and we announced most of them and plan to fix in the future but still welcome if you found some and still want to report us.

Current status of this game is "on hold" since We run out of money to hire for more music  force us work on other smaller project and hope we might earn enough money to get more music. :p

I hope people enjoy the demo and please visit our FB if you like it. XD

You can download our demo here
http://www.moddb.com/games/metaloidorigin/downloads/mo-demo

*The we cut out some feature from this demo you might expect some different once the game release*

[Oddball]

I found these old prototypes from 8 years ago while looking for something else. I made each in less than four hours and some of them are just clones, but well, they did take less than four hours to make.

	Download Crosshair (232KB) Crosshair is a basic Robotron clone made in one day. With such a short development time the balancing may be a little off, so it may be too easy or too hard. Avoid everything that is orange, including the walls, and shoot anything that moves. Enjoy! Xbox360/joypad controls (Recommended) Start game: Button 'A' or '1' Move: Left stick Shoot: Right stick Bomb: Button 'A', '1', '9' or right trigger Keys/mouse controls Start game: Left mouse button Move: Keys 'w', 'a', 's' and 'd' shoot: Left mouse button Bomb: Right mouse button
Download Lunar Buggy (191KB) Controls Move/spin left/right: Left/right arrow or left stick* Thruster: Up arrow, 1/'A' button or right trigger* Reset game: 'R' key Exit game: 'Esc' key *Recommended controls
	Download Barrel Drop (457KB) Barrel Drop is a turn based physics game for two players. How to play The object of the game is try and let as few barrels as possible fall into the fire. Players take it in turns to remove gooey blobs from the game area. After a player removes a blob if any barrels fall into the fire then his opponent is awarded a point for each. The winner is the player with the most points when no more barrels or blobs are left. The current players turn is shown at the top of the screen along with the current scores. Tips on playing You get all your points before you remove a blob each turn. Take your time and allow all the barrels to settle before taking your next blob.
Download Trebuchet (265KB) To start the trebuchet swinging press the 'Start' button. Press it again to release the projectile. Press it a third time to reload the trebuchet. It's as simple as that. have fun.
	Download F360 Challenge (2.36MB) There's no game element yet Just drive around the track. Stay off the grass as it's been raining and it's very skiddy. An Xbox360 controller is the best option for controls as it gives the best all-round analogue controls, but a standard joypad or keys will do. Enjoy! Toggle info: 'F1' Toggle view: 'Enter' Quit: 'Escape' Controls: Xbox360 pad (Recommended) Accelerate: Right trigger Brake: Left trigger Steer: Left analogue stick Hand brake: 'X' button Controls: Keys Accelerate: Up arrow Brake: Down arrow Steer: Left/right arrow Hand brake: 'Spacebar'
Download Spire of Ooze (781KB) Just click on the screen to add 'ooze', and click on blobs of 'ooze' to remove them. The window can be resized, and the screen can be scrolled by moving the cursor near the top or bottom of the window. The idea is to to make the tallest 'spire' you can, but there's no completion or highscore so make up any goal you want.
	Download Line Slider (349KB) Draw with then left mouse button and scroll the display with the right mouse button. When you are ready press 'Play'. You can 'Pause' or 'Stop' the sim at anytime without losing your work. Use 'Clear' to delete everything. And that's about it. Have fun.

[GaiaX2]

Ah yes, the difficulties of making a game. Made a small demo using code made from advice given by people (as well as a public domain engine that no longer exists). Maybe that wasn't the best idea after all.. It's a project of mine that's been put on hold 'till I can find more helpful ways to reduce memory in the game's code.

(Major Warning: there are no menus as it's VERY incomplete, so you'll have to kill the program by hitting the [X] button at the top-right corner)




Download Copper Night

CONTROLS:

Move: Keys Arrow keys 'left' and 'right'
Jump: Key: Arrow key 'up'
Punch: Key 'X' (warning: does nothing)

[Melaniipon]

Oh oh oh!

A jam on itch.io had me release my beautiful unfinished work. They're not beautiful. They're horrible lol.

You can find them here: https://melaniipon.itch.io/fantasy-unfinished-2-pack