It’s been a while since I’ve written about my abandoned game projects. I think it’s time to dig through the archives for some more half-built games from the last two years! These aren’t all of the games I’ve started since last time, but these are a few I found interesting to show in their incomplete state.

If you haven’t read my previous post about abandoned projects, you can do so here!

Garrett’s Game Competition - Game 1

February 2020

A Metroidvania game based in space. This was planned to be entry 1 in a series of games that would be released over a year. Each game would have a leaderboard and competitive aspects. This particular game would have the player exploring a space station that had emitted a distress beacon. The player would have to fight their way through the ghost town of a spaceship and uncover what had happened. Story wise it was heavily inspired by games like System Shock and Prey (2017).

The game’s foundation was pretty solid. I had built my most robust 2d movement system to date. Shooting and moving felt extremely fluid and well tuned. I had also spent some time making an interesting death animation, including some physics when the gun flew out of the player’s hands. Some great music I’d found online from Lone Peak Music helped set the mood, and changed cleanly with different contexts (i.e. on death).

I’d also experimented with a new style of character for this game.

Unfortunately I ran into issues coming up with interesting enemies. I wanted there to be a sense of dread, but couldn’t come up with what I felt were very interesting combatants that filled that requirement. Eventually the project fizzled out as momentum was lost.

I had a signficant amount of design documentation built at the end, here is a high-level view of the game map.

Landingzone

April 2020

I got this idea in my head to combine two genres of games to add some interesting mechanics. I’ve had this itch to build some sort of RTS type of game where the soldiers take orders but mostly play themselves. The idea came to me to mix up a sort of horde survival/base building RTS with a game of Tetris.

From this was born Landingzone.

The player is in control of a group of soldiers guarding a helicopter landing pad. The goal is to rescue civilians fleeing from cities to the north, south, east, and west. At the same time the player had to protect the landingzone and keep it safe enough to call in a helicopter to retrieve the civilians being saved.

The player can only send orders to soldiers once every 10 seconds or so, and must watch things play out during that time. Every 10 seconds the player is also given random obstacles they can save or place just like in tetris. These were things like solid concrete walls or chainlink fences in various configurations.

The game actually played really interestingly, but I ran into limitations with Godot and my own programming naivety. Turns out calculating movement for 50 zombies over 500 tiles can be expensive, and the game suffered performance issues.

I really hope I can revisit this idea one day because it was a lot of fun. I need to get better at AI navigation programming before I can properly execute it though!

If you want to checkout the game, I actually open sourced the code on my Github here.

Runescape inspired Battle Royale (RSBR)

November 2020

Diving into multiplayer games is always a chore for indie developers. Networking is hard! I tried my hand at one with what I referred to as RSBR.

This was inspired by some of my friends doing Runescape speed-runs. I thought it would be cool to build a battle royale game that played like Runescape. 30-45 minute rounds, everyone starts at level 1. The world slowly corrupts around them until all players are forced to fight in the middle. This would be server authoritative just like Runescape.

There were a few cool ideas in this game. One was that if you won a round, you got to keep your character at whatever level they finished at. You could then queue into another round with that character and player other people that started with their characters also at your level. This meant you could actually have a cool player build, win the round, then play again with that build.

I also experimented with procedural animations using AnimationTrees in Godot. I probably wouldn’t do this again as the end result wasn’t very nice, but it did let me combine animations if a player had various equipment on.

Here is a clip of the working prototype.

I had the networking fully functioning including client hosted or dedicated server hosting. The game was entirely server authoritative just as planned, which was pretty difficult!

In the end the game scope was just too big. A recurring theme it… Maybe one day I will revisit this at a smaller scale because it just feels like such a cool idea.

Honorable mentions

Below are some assets from games that also never saw the light of day! Most of these didn’t get as far as the above games did.

Ludum Dare 49 - Pre-pivot game

A town management game. Play the role of god and indirectly guide your tribe to dominate the land.

Depth

A story driven game about some explorers trapped in a collapsed cave. Fight off monsters, heavy-dark themes throughout.

MEGA

Wave survival game built with my brother in-laws. They provided the game design and art, I just did the coding! Maybe to be completed another day.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series sometime 2023 😂