Author Topic: Game ideas that never came to fruition  (Read 14180 times)

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Offline Builderboy

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Game ideas that never came to fruition
« on: September 19, 2010, 04:17:22 am »
So over the course of my time programing, i have had numerous game ideas and concept code that was just never realized.  The concepts were there, the ideas were there, even sometimes a lot of code was written, but it all ended in nothing.  Here are some of the ideas i have had over the years that i never actually finished

Everything's Eventual
Based off the short story from Stephan King, you are offered a job after a secret company learns of your unique ability to control peoples actions by writing special types of messages.  They employ you as a special sort of assassin, working from a small town, where they set you up in a small house, with minimal cash, and provide you with anything you could ever need.  It would be a text based game, where you can navigate your house, small city, and your computer terminal.  Using your computer, you receive targets via email, and you send them messages to make them commit suicide.  After playing the game for a bit and completing several challenges, you hear about the suicide of a refutable cancer researching doctor for no reason, you start to suspect your employers.  You can actually then chose to send emails to your supervisors to kill them and escape your city to find the company and shut them down, stay in your city and lead a small life, or remain under the employment and get arrested when the police find out what you are doing.  Its a multi-ending story, and i thought it would be very fun to code, but it really never got going.

Demolition
This game really didnt have any plot, but was the brainchild of my desire to use a lot of cool weapons.  I wanted to be able to use a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, grenades, and all other sorts of weapons realistically on the calculator.  The basic idea, was you are presented with a mission, assassinate the terrorist, whatever, the plot wasn't really thought out much.  The gameplay was what i was focused on.  I wanted totally dynamic terrain, where you could snipe supports and beams would fall.  Shooting barrels would set nearby things on fire and they would collapse and destroy other things.  You could inflict different amounts of damage to all objects until they were completely destroyed, and you were given a plethora of weapons that would interact with the physics of the world realistically.  Obviously this is a very large undertaking for even lib asisted basic, and as soon as i sat down and tried to start writing the engine, it pretty much died right there.

Unnamed Strategy Game
This was the game with the most complete code, and inspired by the Omnicalcs linking functionality.  The basic idea was you have a Base, you must defend it however possible.  The base could generate troops to defend it, and the troops could in turn build other things to defend themselves.  Like walls, fences, factories to produce gold, towers, ect... Both you and your opponent had their own screen, and between you was a screen called no mans land.  Your objective was to leave your screen, cross no mans land, infiltrate your opponents screen and destroy their base.  You had to manage developing your home base, while upgrading troops to send over to infiltrate the opponents base.  The cool thing was anybody can build anywhere, as long as they have troops to build things.  So if you get to no mans land first, you can start your own base.  And you could even build walls inside of an opponents base as long as your troops took enough gold with them.  I had code written for complete multiplayer interaction on a single screen, where you could build objects, move them around, and interact with them.  Again, though, the complexity of the game idea just never worked out for me.

So yeah, these are some major game projects that i never really completed, but i was really excited about at the time.  It just didnt work out, but if someone wanted to pick one up, id be more than happy to give them out ^^

Offline meishe91

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #1 on: September 19, 2010, 04:43:42 am »
These sound like really cool ideas. I'm sorry they didn't quite work out though, that's always a bummer. What were these written in? Like pure TI-BASIC or hybrid?
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Offline Builderboy

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #2 on: September 19, 2010, 04:46:29 am »
Everything's Eventual was going to be written in pure TiBasic, since it was going to be a text only game.  The strategy game was going to be an Omnicalc game because of its excellent linking abilities.  Demolition was going to be written using xLib because of its great sprite abilities.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2010, 05:36:49 am »
Illusiat 2002: La QuĂȘte Ultime (The Ultimate Quest) (2002)

-pseudo 3D (with some actual basic 3D every now and then) RPG in the style of Star Ocean 2, Legend Of Dragoon and FFVII-IX in terms of map engine style, where battles were 3 chars vs 1 enemy. Story was a bit simple (it involved 4 elemental crystals, lol) but more developed than any Illusiat game prior Illusiat 9. Game was gonna be split in 5 chapters, have about 10 hours of gameplay and amazing animations for pure-BASIC. It was what was supposed to be Illusiat 5. Game was 79 KB and 2.5 chapters complete when Mirage corrupted my archive and forced me to reset the entire memory. I had no mean to backup at the time, except my bro's 83+, which he asked me to clean from the game backup made two weeks before as he needed the calc, so everything but the title screen were lost.

Team (2002)
Following the deletion of Illusiat 2002 in Feb 2002, my motivation was at its lowest. I tried making a dumbed down RPG split into chapters again, but it never turned out to be as good as Illusiat 2002. It was broken as well so I cancelled it. Following that, I stopped calc programming for a few months. Demo available for download.

Illusion of Mana/Secret Of Mana 83+ (2002)
First attempt at a Zelda-style game, using Illusiat 6 engine. Project died as I was not ready to work with enemy collision detection yet.

The Reign Of Legends 3-II: Theola Shire (2004)
An Omnicalc direct sequel to The Reign Of Legends 3, involving the only surviving playable character from the previous game as well as the mysterious guy appearing during final battle. 3rd char slot was just gonna be random characters that sometimes joined your party. Game was going to occur on the moon in 2235 AD, where humans took refuge following the destruction of almost everything on the Earth in 2200 AD. The game did not go far in planning stages and no line of code was ever written for it.

The Reign Of Legends 4ever (2004)
A RPG starting at the end of time where 4 groups of 2 warriors have each their own mission to accomplish. There are warriors of earth, wind, water and fire. Each need to go in the respective elemental worlds. Once each tasks are accomplished, the path to the final battle (and resurrecting the world as it was before its destruction) is opened. At this point you choose whichever character you want. In each world, if I remember, you usually had another person joining your party.

It was gonna be possible to swap between missions and return to visit the respective areas. Items from a mission could be used in the other, so some missions allowed you to complete others .

The project died because it was just too massive to take on. The overworld for the Earth world was only 1/4 finished and it was almost 100 maps. Also on UTI people started whining about the usage of ASCII graphics on the overworld and the usage of ASM libs instead of pure-BASIC, so it killed my motivation.

Reuben Quest III: Terror In The Sky (2005 I think)
5-level xLIB grayscale game. I then realized how hard such sprites were to create. Nitacku grayscale ditherer did not exist back then so yeah. Plus I had no idea for the game battles and to manage to fit everything in RAM (which gave me lots of trouble in the first two games). Also, almost everyone started hating large games with multiple files so I decided against starting this project.

Diortem (2005)
Omnicalc Metroid clone. The reason why it died is the same as the last one stated for Reuben III. However, this project was revived as Metroid II Evolution over one year later and ported to xLIB. Demo available for download. It features different enemies than Metroid II Evolution, like actual Metroids.

Project Omega: Race Ngine (2007)
Lotus Turbo Challenge style game using xLIB. It improved on Lotus in the way that when turning, the background scrolled left/right, but as the speed was already a bit low, I got worried the addition of more features would make the game too slow to be fun. In addition to that, I had some life/online issues at the time that hindered me. Demo available for download.

The Reign of Legends 4 (2007)
Another attempt at a ROL4, this time graphical again. You had to save the world from the approaching void. This world had 6 kingdoms representing an element: Earth, wind, water, fire, darkness and void. The story was a parralel with TI community events at the time as well as its state, although made into a fantasy RPG story. Even the 6 kingdom names had similarities with the active TI-83+ forums at the time, such as Omnitia, the kingdom of darkness, which is nearly deserted early in the game. The game featured a job system like Final Fantasy III for the NES and V for the SNES. Unfortunately, only the menu was finished, along with the job system and cure magic spells in it. Battles were started but not even close from being finished. As for the story, only the beginning and the end were coded. For some reasons I kinda lost interest after a few weeks of coding. The menu and some files are available for download and requires xLIB.

Illusiat 13: The Lost Chapter/The Last Chapter/The Final Chapter (2009)
Final game in the Illusiat serie, worked on over 6 years after the previous one that was meant to be the last came out. Repeated online issues with someone (added up to other stuff I had to deal with in a short amount of time), which I never really recovered from, teared apart my motivation and I cancelled the project during Summer 2009, despite the game being 90% complete (only the final dungeon/battle, ending and an optional dungeon  needed to be done, as well as a few enemies/bosses.). It was revived for a short while and renamed from I13 The Lost Chapter to I13 The Last Chapter, but only some bugfixes occured as well as cosmetical changes during saving/loading. It died afterward again. In 2010 it was revived again but no work was put on it except some planned story changes in my head. Finally I gave the project to another staff, although it is not a priority. Game is fully playable until the final dungeon and available for download.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2010, 05:49:44 am by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Hot_Dog

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #4 on: September 19, 2010, 09:57:59 am »
Elimination  This was going to be an RPG game with a major "HQ" world along with 100 shorter levels.  I was going to use the same approach I am using with S.A.D. in terms of talking and cutscenes, except I was writing the game for Celtic III.  I was also planning a sequel.  I got so far as coding the text routine and the movement engine, but that was all.  Some of you will be familiar with the storyline because I played with these two games a little bit and it became "Of Mankind, The Ptaloids, and the Tosonians in 4 Parts"

Super Mario Conquest  A lesser-known coder named Rebma Boss had this idea and never started it, so he allowed me to look at it and see if I could do something with it.  It was to be an RTS game that involved no building construction and resource gathering.  (Yes, those do exist, for instance Pikimin and Netrek)

Squeeze It was supposed to be the "Ultimate Compression Program" for computer, as I tried time and time again to come up with a way to compress files from 100 MB to 100 KB.  (The idea was to come up with a way to compress a file, then re-compress it, then re-compress it, etc.)  Not only did all 200 of my methods fail, many of the methods made the files bigger.

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #5 on: September 19, 2010, 11:03:24 am »
Unnamed RPG (2007): It was going to be a full RPG with 3x5 text sprites. I got 10 maps and the store done (and a cheat :P) and was working on the battle engine when I realized it would far surpass 24 KB when finished. Being hesitant to use xLIB, which I was afraid would add too much to the memory cost, I stopped dev.

Unnamed RPG 2 (2008): Now with a lot more experience with xLIB, I decided to try making an RPG again, but this time of the kind where you walk around with a gun (I actually made all the sprites which IMO were pretty decent :-\) and shoot enemies when you come to them. The AI stumped me, so I gave up.

Unnamed RPG 3 (2009): Yes, another one. I had an idea to make a pure-BASIC RPG with better compression than I knew of in 2007 and 5x5 sprites. Then I had a better idea for a puzzle platformer, so this got replaced by Absolute Insanity (which I actually finished :)). And so I have yet to make a working top-down RPG...

There were many others where I got a bit of work done (or in the case of some, 90% or more done), then gave up for one reason or another (often due to boredom).




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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #6 on: September 19, 2010, 12:01:56 pm »
Fight: Dont ask, I made it for the DCS contest entry, but it FAILED hard, I then proceeded to make TI-Mail

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #7 on: September 19, 2010, 12:02:52 pm »
Fuel: Old contest entry, but it was super slow.  I lost the source code, but I found it again in a group on my calc last night ^_^

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #8 on: September 19, 2010, 12:37:49 pm »
Elimination  This was going to be an RPG game with a major "HQ" world along with 100 shorter levels.  I was going to use the same approach I am using with S.A.D. in terms of talking and cutscenes, except I was writing the game for Celtic III.  I was also planning a sequel.  I got so far as coding the text routine and the movement engine, but that was all.  Some of you will be familiar with the storyline because I played with these two games a little bit and it became "Of Mankind, The Ptaloids, and the Tosonians in 4 Parts"

Super Mario Conquest  A lesser-known coder named Rebma Boss had this idea and never started it, so he allowed me to look at it and see if I could do something with it.  It was to be an RTS game that involved no building construction and resource gathering.  (Yes, those do exist, for instance Pikimin and Netrek)

Squeeze It was supposed to be the "Ultimate Compression Program" for computer, as I tried time and time again to come up with a way to compress files from 100 MB to 100 KB.  (The idea was to come up with a way to compress a file, then re-compress it, then re-compress it, etc.)  Not only did all 200 of my methods fail, many of the methods made the files bigger.
Didn't you also have a few S.A.D-based games as well, one being for the contest and the other one in xLIB, that never came to fruition?

Fuel: Old contest entry, but it was super slow.  I lost the source code, but I found it again in a group on my calc last night ^_^
Is it discontinued or will it be revived, though?

Offline apcalc

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #9 on: September 19, 2010, 12:46:36 pm »
Ballz:  A remake of this game in C for the TI-89.  I think I still have the source somewhere, but I doubt I will ever release it.  I had it complete, with the exception of (1) the stars in the levels and (2) I only implemented about 1/3 of the levels.  Also, the physics were pathetic.  One good thing, the speed was 9000x better than that BASIC version. ;)


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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #10 on: September 19, 2010, 12:50:52 pm »
I assume in that game you must just press the jump key at the right moment to not hit walls?

I wonder why the person didn't made it so the ball moves every 4 or 8 pixel like most 83+ BASIC games... framerate would be low but at least movement/gameplay would be faster
« Last Edit: September 19, 2010, 12:51:58 pm by DJ Omnimaga »

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #11 on: September 19, 2010, 01:04:49 pm »
DJ, I will probably continue it, even though it is slow.

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #12 on: September 19, 2010, 01:08:21 pm »
Aah ok. Is it 15-MHz only right now?

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #13 on: September 19, 2010, 01:13:04 pm »
Yes.  You can run it at 6, but God FSM help you.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2010, 01:13:26 pm by SirCmpwn »

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Re: Game ideas that never came to fruition
« Reply #14 on: September 19, 2010, 01:41:59 pm »
Ah ok, I was wondering if the slowness was in 15 MHz mode or just 6. If it was slow only in 6 MHz it could be made a 15 MHz-only game.
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