Game Graveyard

I have a short attention span when I'm making games. Often I'll get to the interesting game mechanic, or the unique idea of the game and thenmove onto something else without polishing it.

Its quite rare that I release a game. My itch.io page currently only has 6 games: 3 fom game jams, 2 random unbalanced games, and Dog Castle, my most complete game.

This post is about some unfinished games, basically the projects in my open recent menu of my IDE.

Turn-based game

This doesn't have a name yet, but it is pizza-delivery themed.

It features an NPC team vs a player team, a set amount of moves, and some pathfinding. In this screenshot, fences are passable, but have a much higher cost. The blue region shows where you can get to in one turn. Across the bottom are the players for each team. If you select "Aim", you can throw a pizza in a straight line, though it will stop if it hits any solid tiles along the way.

The game requires more art, but also I'm not convinced that the levels would be varied enough, or the randomly generated levels are all beat-able.

A '3D' Sim Tower

What if SimTower was 3D, or at least had paralax effects? What cool features could we add?

The basic pathfinding works, there's a simple day/night cycle, and I've started creating more detailed 3D models.

Sim Tower might not be perfect, but it is still relatively well balanced, and I'm not sure this style is adding much to it. I think I really need someone focussing on 3D models, and I get bored too quickly.

The background is confusing, and the perspective view leads to occlusion of rooms by their floors/ceilings/walls.

I'm sure I could do something with it, but I just don't like how its looking at the moment. Implementing elevators will probably make it more exciting to watch at least.

Burger Quest

How about a rogue-like dungeon game, made out of circles and lines. That's easy for collision detection, right?

You can walk around and chop the little leggy guys. The sprites were fun to make, but the levels look like floating platforms. If I try to add walls it either occludes the player, or looks like they're walking around trenches. The sharp sprites also clash with the impossible-to-disable anti-aliasing that HTML Canvas does to the circles and lines.

I could do it in WebGL, and write a cool shader which could do other cool things, but that's a lot of work

Non-linear spaces

How about a game where each doorway has a random room behind it, and only loads as it opens?

Apart from the fact that the latest build is broken, and all of the 3d models are developer art, this game lets you walk from room to room, forever chaining new rooms to the world. As soon as a door closes, that room is unloaded (basically).

There is some okay-ish collision detection and the doors animate nicely, but there's no gameplay there, just the concept