THE GRAVEYARD
Greetings, mortals! Welcome to the terrifying Studio Hunty graveyard. I was impressed by Konjak's courage in creating a whole section of his website dedicated to his abandoned projects, and decided to go ahead and do the same thing with my abandoned projects. So I went digging through old directories on my hard drive, and kept digging, and digging, and digging. Putting this list together was very cathartic, and also a heady trip down memory lane; many of these projects I'd completely forgotten about until I found them tucked away on my hard drive.
Everything here is "as is". None of it is finished, but some of these things are more finished than others. I will at least note what format a game is in, but for the most part I will leave it to you to explore and experiment and figure out controls.
So then! Without further ado, here are some (but not nearly all!) of the half-finished horrors I've laid to rest, in alphabetical order.
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Adoration (flash) 2007 I think this was going to be some sort of casual Populous-esque game made for one of Dan Cook's design challenges. You can move around blocks, but that's about it. |
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Bullet Hell (flash) 2006 This was going to be a literal "bullet hell" game, where you play a damned soul in Hell, fighting bosses based on the seven deadly sins. |
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Cell and Cell Cyc (exe) 2000 Cell is a puzzle game about matching up groups of elemental cells, where "gravity" changes every time you drop a cluster of cells. I liked the way the cells looked moving around and grouping and ungrouping, so I made cellcyc as a sort of screensaver that would move cells around endlessly. It ended up being one of the inspirations for Slider. |
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Cloak (exe) 2004 A test of a 3D game engine, but primarily a test of a "Wind-Waker-style camera", where the controls move the character relative to the camera position. Cloak used to be able to jump, but I lost that functionality at some point while updating the 3D library. Cloak carries a "scytar", an electric guitar with a folding scythe blade attached, that was supposed to hang on his back, but for some reason sticks out over his shoulder, and I could never get it to point the right way. I made Cloak and the scytar from scratch in Milkshape 3D. |
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Coffee Drop DS (exe) 2004 Careful, this file is a lot bigger than the others. This was one of my bigger failed projects; an attempt to port Coffee Drop to the DS. It's not actually a DS game, though; I made this as a PC executable while I was waiting to get an official DS dev kit from Nintendo, but I was never able to. Like a DS, however, you can click on things on the bottom half of the screen with the mouse, so I recommend clicking "how to play" before you try to play. Music is by KaW, who let me use it with the promise that I'd pay him if the game made any money, which never happened. |
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Consume (flash) 2006 This was my original idea for the Experimental Gameplay "consume" competition, but it didn't really go anywhere so I made In the Pit instead. And I'm glad I did! |
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Devil Bunny Needs a Ham (Gameboy) 1999 This was the beginning of an attempt to make a Gameboy Color version of Cheapass Games' boardgame "Devil Bunny Needs a Ham", which is about chefs trying to climb up the side of a building while a psychotic rabbit tries to knock them off. There's no interactivity here, but it's doing a lot behind the scenes to render the graphics, so I thought I'd go ahead and include it anyway. A couple years later I worked with James Earnest (the founder of Cheapass Games and creator of "Devil Bunny Needs a Ham") on Brawl: Kasanova, but I never mentioned this game to him. |
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Doctor Raven Darktalon Blood (flash) 2005 These are some animation tests for a game I was going to make of Doctor Raven Darktalon Blood, a minor character in Penny Arcade. It was going to be a metrovania, and the engine eventually evolved into Sketchy. This was one of those projects where I was going to make something from someone else's IP, and then show it to them, and they would be so impressed that they'd grant me the rights to finish it, or something. |
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eleMENTAL (flash) 2006 This was going to be sort of a cross between One-Piece Mansion and Die Anstalt; you move patients with psychoses based on various elements around in an insane asylum, and they're affected by the psychoses of the patients in nearby cells. So, if you put a patient with an ice-based psychosis next to a patient with a fire-based psychosis, then the ice-based psychosis would melt and the patient would become sane. |
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FireArm (flash) 2006 FireArm was going to be a fantasy-themed Cabal clone. An alchemist is forced by an evil king to make a powerful new weapon, and in the process he accidentally summons a gooey cthuloid monster. When the king shows up to collect, the alchemist tries to hide the monster from him, and the king gets angry and cuts off the alchemist's hand, kills his family, and takes part of the monster. The alchemist passes out, and when he comes to he discovers that part of the monster has attached itself to the stub where his hand was, and has turned itself into a powerful gun. Hijinks ensue. |
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Fuselade (exe) 2003 A versus version of Popcap's Rocket Mania, where you can buy different cannons that have different effects, like ice cannons that freeze tiles and blade cannons that create dead-end tiles. |
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Garmada (exe) 2009 (requires the XNA redistributable) Garmada was a game I abandoned to work on Crosstown. It was mostly an experiment in procedurally generating swirly, Galaga-style flight patterns. |
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Gladiator (flash) 2006 No interaction in this one, but this was going to be a flash clone of the Taito arcade game Gladiator. |
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Glass Knight (flash) 2006 The beginnings of a Ghosts 'n' Goblins-style game designed to look like a moving stained-glass window. |
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Globs (flash) 2005 Some globs that fall down to the bottom of the screen and seek each other out, eventually all globbing together. An experiment for something, but I don't remember what. |
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Goblin King (flash) 2004 Every programmer or game designer who's ever read The Diamond Age has tried to make their own version of "the Primer". This was my attempt, and it was also inspired in part by a web game called "Banja". I think it's pretty and very accessible. Once the grocer and the butcher reveal their "true forms" you've done everything you can do. |
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Grow 'em Up (flash) 2007 A cross between a bullet hell shmup and the Grow series of games by Eyezmaze. I actually contacted Eyezmaze to ask if he'd like to collaborate with me on this, but never got a response. The enemy changes depending on what part of him you destroy, and it was going to be about the little yellow guy rescuing other little yellow guys from the clutches of the boss monster. |
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Gungeon (flash) 2007 Gungeon was either going to be a Diablo-like with guns, or a Diablo-like first-person shooter. This is just a routine that generates random names for guns. |
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Hexplore (flash) 2009 This was going to be my entry to the JayIsGames "explore"-themed casual game design competition, but I got distracted. |
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Killgore (flash) 2008 A Metal Slug-style scrolling shooter starring an angry bull on a mission to liberate cows from the meat industry. I was working on this with an extremely talented (and reliable!) animator named Joseph King, and we were doing this to take a break from Spectrum of Violence, another project we're working on together. I think that Joseph is now working on Killgore with another programmer who's turning it into more of a beat 'em up. |
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Lightning test (flash) 2008 Just a test of a simple lightning effect. I like the way it looks, and I'll probably use this effect in something at some point. |
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Maze Generator (flash) 2007 A maze generator. An early study for a hacking game I was working on. |
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Mega Monster Melee (flash) 2006 Oh, wow, I'd totally forgotten that I'd actually started on this game. This was my first idea for the Experimental Gameplay "dance pad" competition, but I didn't like how it was turning out, so I made Wedgie Ninja instead and won second place! |
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M.I.L.F. (flash) 2007 A cross between M.U.L.E. and Settlers of Catan. The title stands for "Multipurpose Industrial Life Form", of course! |
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Moving platform test (flash) 2005 I'd long been mystified with how sprites "know" they're on moving platforms in platform games, and this was an experiment to figure out one way of handling it. The sprite keeps track of what's immediately below him, and if it's a moving platform he moves with it. |
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Mr. Stompy (exe) 2004 This isn't a game per se, but something I wrote for a friend so that he could use a dance pad to make drum machine noises during a stage performance. Since it uses a dance pad I figured it was close enough to a game to include here. |
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NCP Fighter (Gameboy) 1999 One of my first attempts at a fighting game engine, modelled after Yie Ar Kung Fu, and starring a friend of mine (all of the characters were going to be friends from a mailing list we were on). |
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Neurotic (flash) 2005 This was going to be a game about slowly driving this poor little person insane. So far all you can do is make a scary face appear at the window. |
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Ninja Dot (flash) 2005 This was an early study for a cute, top-down stealth action game. It's a mechanic for stealth-killing multiple enemies at once; press the space bar when the green line is lined up with the nearest square. |
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Renedood (flash) 2004 I have fond childhood memories of Renegade, although I also recognize how ridiculous it is. This was the beginning of an homage to it, starring this goofy slack-jawed character. |
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Roob (flash) 2007 I think I started making this for a JayIsGames "physics"-themed competition. The final game was going to present you with levels where there were some blocks already on the screen, and you had a specific set of other blocks to use to complete the path to get the ball to the goal. In this early version, you just have an empty screen and unlimited access to all the different block types to play with. |
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Sequence and Destroy (flash) 2007 I think this was going to be some sort of groovy rhythm-based interplanetary RTS, where music emerged from the placement and activation of your various buildings. |
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Ship (Gameboy) 1999 Hmm... it's been 10 years since I did this, and I think the concept was pretty hazy to begin with. I think it was going to be about wandering around a spaceship talking to people, with a focus on social interactions rather than any sort of videogamey violence. As it is all you can do with this is switch back and forth between two character portraits (with some weird glitchy-ness on the sides that I don't remember being there before) that were going to be used for dialogue. |
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Side Scroller (flash) 2005 The beginnings of a Metal Slug / Gunstar Heroes-style run 'n' gun game. Use the arrow keys, and A, S, and D. I was really happy with how the aiming worked in this game; hold down S and the gun will stay aimed in the same direction no matter how you move, or you can hold down D and stay stationary while aiming in different directions. |
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slope study (flash) 2007 I'm not entirely sure how 2D sidescrollers handle uneven ground. This was an experiment in figuring out how to do it, and it worked out pretty well. |
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Spellcaster (flash) 2004 An early experiment in shmup enemy movement patterns. |
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Tactics (flash) 2006 An experiment with moving characters on an isometric grid, as in a tactics game. |
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Verticode (flash) 2005 Preliminary designs for a musical shmup for the DS. Since I never got into real DS dev, however, this project got shelved indefinitely. |