7/31/2021 0 Comments [CANCELLED] - Part 2DISCLAIMER: Like [CANCELLED] - Part 1, this blog post was written back in 2019. Portions of this blog post have been rewritten to either omit certain information or update content to be more accurate to the current year. Despite these changes, most of the writing was kept intact for posterity. Yes, this is a continuation to the first of my little series about cancelled games. I still have a few Unity projects left to talk about, so we're going to start with The Mist, which I briefly mentioned in the first post. In this game, a priest from a small English village is sent out to perform an exorcism on some strange red-mist spewing obelisks that have cropped up in the forest. Of course, it turns out the occupying force isn't the devil, but a long lost goddess of meat that has returned to perform what is essentially the rapture on every living creature. Despite how nuts it sounds, The Mist was supposed to be a prequel to The Door, that one game I mentioned in the first [CANCELLED] post. The Mist originally featured the microphone as its sole means of fighting enemies. There was a proper menu and internal structure that would help the player get their mic set up and functioning in gameplay. At this point in development, I realized I didn't really want to make a gimmick game where you just scream into the mic to kill ghouls, so I went for a more jokey route and had it so the player would just pummel enemies by mashing the space bar. Unfortunately, I can't show anything from that stage in development. The .gif above is the only surviving content from this version of the game because I forgot to back it up when I was transferring computers. All that's left is the microphone system, which does virtually nothing because the game was cancelled early into development. It's hard to say what I really learned from The Mist. This was around the time where I started trying to use normal maps, and that's about all it has going for it. Well, I guess the microphone system was definitely new to me at the time, but ultimately it didn't really mean much seeing as it got scrapped a few days into development. I wish I had finished the punch-em-up version of The Mist, though I don't think it would've really related to The Door that much in terms of tone. On one hand, you have a post-apocalyptic horror game where a man tries to piece together the disappearance of his neighbor, and on the other you have a game where Pope Francis punches the shit out of a ghost. Continuing on with the trend of pushing that 320x240 resolution is Home Sweet Home. That name wasn't meant to be final, but ultimately I just stopped caring about the project and bailed after months of adding a random crap to small parts of the house. I never took it seriously, and it honestly didn't need that kind of attention. It was originally supposed to be an environment test. I was bored, made a small kit of particles, and then I decided I wanted lightbulb trees that rained down glowing crap all over the yard. After a bit of work I started to, once again, think it would be a great idea to expand it into something larger. I wanted a game similar to #21: The World where you would explore different environments tethered together by unique objects in the world, but as you can probably guess it never left the first level. Hell, the first level barely had anything in it: A bench, a fountain and a shelf with some miscellaneous models on it. Not much of a house, all things considered. Home Sweet Home occupies an interesting point in my history as a game developer. Because of how slow the project's development was, it ended up overlapping with several major events in my life and receiving small pieces from each of them. Most noteworthy of these events is the sudden jump in modelling quality when I began doing environment models for a former friend's Halloween game. These models were eventually imported into Home Sweet Home, where they stood in stark contrast against the simplified low-poly models that the game started with. Unlike some of the other games I've cancelled, Home Sweet Home doesn't really have any lessons to teach. It's just a postcard of a weirdly specific time in my life. The next project to meet its fate in the shadow realm was Dead Weight. Unlike the other projects on this list which were developed during late 2017 and back, this game began development somewhere early in 2019, making it the most recent game to be cancelled in this batch. Essentially, the sun becomes corrupted and decides to bleach the entire planet, killing most life in the process. The moon is deposed and left on a cliff, leaving the world in a constant state of incineration. One of the few survivors is a stocky little guy named Jakob who finds the moon and is accidentally chained to it by magic. As a result, Jakob has no other option than to carry his unwanted companion to the highest peak of the planet and kill the sun. Dead Weight was one of the few cancelled games to actually receive a proper planning document. There was a narrative, a general path of progression, plans for how the ball and chain mechanic would work, etc. Ultimately, that didn't really matter much because it wasn't poor planning that killed it. This time, the thing that ended up dragging a project to the archive was Unity itself. I ended up with broken seams on tiles that looked so horrible I had to give up. I spent hour after hour trying to patch the seams, but nothing worked. I ended up trying a strategy I used while working on Blip that compressed the tiles together by a small amount to cover seams, but it completely flopped. At this point, I'm guessing the tile sprites were sampling too far out of their boundaries and grabbing the outlines of other tiles in the tilesheet, but that hardly matters anymore. It's been years since Dead Weight was being worked on, and I have no motivation to turn back and try to fix any of that now. As with Home Sweet Home, I didn't really gain any new skills from working on Dead Weight. It was sort of fun to make a game around ball-and-chain physics, I guess. It had the potential to be expanded into a larger game, but ultimately that wasn't enough to encourage me to try and fix the major bugs I faced. This next game is a bit of a personal twinge for me, so there's a lot of information I'm likely going to omit from this part of the blog post. To summarize what it was, I was trying to recreate a former friend's first game as fast as possible. I thought it would be funny to surprise him with it. That was basically the entire premise I started with when I began developing this game. A lot of the writing ahead has been kept intact since 2019, but any names referencing the friend or his game series were removed. As you've probably guessed from the pattern so far, I ended up expanding the remake project so far that it just exploded into tiny little pieces of flaming shrapnel. Here goes the story of possibly the most ill-advised project I've ever tried to tackle. The original game was mechanically simple and hardly had as much detail packed into it as some of the other games in the series it belonged to, so back in the Summer of 2017 I decided to sit down and try my hand at creating a remake as fast as possible because I thought it might be a fun challenge. Disregarding how little it looked like the game it was shamelessly aping, the remake was going smooth until I got to the second level. I really didn't want to recycle the skybox from the first level, so I tweaked it a bit. This simple, basic action ended up spurring off the most nightmarish bout of feature creep I've ever experienced. The process went as follows: After adding the new skybox, it suddenly occurred to me how empty the sky was in the original game. As a joke, I decided to add a giant freaky head that moaned at the player when they looked at it. Then I decided to add a secret bridge into that head's mouth that took you to a secret level. Then I said "well, wouldn't it be fun if you could explore these levels in a novel way? How about a jetpack powerup that only lasts for the level you picked it up in?" At that point, I completely lost my mind, went apeshit and ended up trying to make the game into a titanic spinoff instead of a remake. Idea after idea just kept coming in. I decided I would merge some characters and ideas from a later game in the series into the mix to add some flavor to parts of the remake. Then I decided I would have the graphics drastically improve in a sort of meta joke about the game's budget getting a boost about a sixth of the way in. Then I realized I wanted to add some more mobility mechanics in to certain parts, so now areas had powerups that just lasted for the duration of the level. Then I decided I would add Prey 2016 inspired abilities into the game. Then there was an ENTIRE lineup of guns planned for the player, and then it just kept getting hit with feature creep again and again until it was a pulverized wreck. What started as a dumb test turned into a massive undertaking just to impress the friend who made the original game, and at that point there was no telling how far the remake would expand. Of course, the first portion of the game would remain faithful to the original. Level designs were largely recreated from walking around the first game (and cutting out levels that sucked to navigate), the UI was done as close as possible to the original down to the font size and weird placeholder white backdrops, and cocaine could be snorted and lost as expected. This didn't last long, because I started implementing those aforementioned Prey powers right after I got to the Oasis level. Only three of the powers effectively did anything before the whole system was cut entirely. From left-to-right, there was the Zoom power that let the player scope in to far away areas, the Psy Wave power that fired a wave of psychic energy that knocked rigidbodies around, and the debug teleport ability that was implemented to save travel time. The Cooling Bomb power was never implemented, and relied on enemies to exist for it to have any purpose. There were entire upgrade trees being planned, and as far as I remember there were somewhere around 9 - 12 different upgrade trees for the player to unlock (I say 9 - 12 because I think I had a secret set of 3 upgrade trees planned that the player wouldn't find normally). There were 18 different weapons planned. They behaved similarly to Serious Sam, essentially having 2 weapons per ammo type and one being the economic version to the costlier heavy-damage version. There was no point having any weapons in the game, given how little planning was done to explain how the player got each one or what purpose they served in gameplay. The remake didn't last long whatsoever. About 2-3 months went into it before I lost interest entirely and went on to make some other dumb project that would expand too far and fall into the abyss. Overall, it was definitely worthwhile. It was the beginning of the player controllers I still use today, and there was a hefty learning process in developing most of the game's hardly functional mechanics. This remake is more than just a benchmark, because it holds a lot of inside jokes and mentalities from 2017 that would have been lost otherwise. Sometimes I look back on those moments and feel like there's definitely a lot of "what-ifs" that will never be answered. At the end of the day, none of that matters now. Time has passed; around 4 years to be specific. People move on. That's just par for the course at the end of the day. That's it for now. I don't really have any other significant projects to go over at the moment, but if I manage to recover any of my REALLY old Unity projects from my laptop, I'll be back to go through it. If not, Part 3 will probably be about my GameMaker: Studio projects. There were a lot of large-scale GM:S projects that died off, trust me.
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