The WIP Graveyard

Game Development
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I’ve started and stopped so many WIP’s since I’ve found this site, and 99% of them have never seen the light of day. I’m sure a lot of you are the same. I thought it would be cool to create a topic for us to share our dead WIP’s.

I’d love to look at all of your guys’ code, to see what worked and what didn’t, and to hear your half-baked story pitches :wink:

Spekter is one of my recently abandoned games. I wanted to try and do a more RPG adventure story, with environment exploring and lots of lore. It just… didn’t work. I’m never going to pick this up again, although I might recycle the world building. It was pretty dope.

Another project was lazily called Princess. You’re a fairy tale princess who may or may not want to get married. It was going to be a sort of gender bender thing. Dude-Cinderella, Goose girl (boy?), Frog Prince, Evil Prince. There was also the Little Mermaid, but I was going to keep her a girl. I stopped this one bc I deleted the file on accident :sweat: There used to be more.

Last is Lock and Key, which was a spy game. It had a pretty cool character creation setup. I was going to put in a randomized dossier, and you could edit whichever bits you didn’t like. Or just keep it if you were lazy. Also all LI’s had gender options! I’ve been really into spies lately, so I might pick this up again. I think I’d totally revamp it.

Anyways… Come join me and bring out your dead! :kissing_heart:

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I have tons of half-dead ideas bleeding out in my “CoG” folder on my desktop, but I’m also too paranoid that someone will steal my ideas if I post them and some part of me thinks I’ll get back around to them. So for now, they stay where they lay.

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I think most people have their own ideas, y’know?

And mine are vague enough that I don’t care if they’re stolen ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me…

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I want Carrowvale to be continued. I miss my haunted moors.

@iris - such a multilayered story!

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Say it’s not so, I read the whole of your rpg and think you really have aomething great there. Should really reconsider letting this one rot away as it was really good just reading it from the code. :smile:

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When In Rome was a fantastic WIP. Sadly, it appears to have been abandoned.

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Yes, somebody was once making an analogy (was it @Jacic?) about WIPs being in the desert, and I guess many perish. I have currently 3 (my two original ones plus Tokyo Wizard)… I guess my first one is moribund (who knows whether I will ever finish it?) though I have hopes of finishing the other two between August and September (yeah, right…). But, it’s clearly difficult to actually finish a game…

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Well, at least I like to keep inventory of my abandoned projects. I’ve even got an ‘abandoned projects’ folder in my local ChoiceScript folder. Might as well share the links to the ones which actually made it to the forum with a bit of explanation, I guess.

My first project in ChoiceScript. It bled to death because it was way too ambitious. For every branch I wrote about five new ones popped up, and I couldn’t possibly write that much.

I cringe whenever I read it back, mainly because of my grammar and because of how insensitively I handled some very sensitive topics.

More of a coding exercise than a game this is probably the point where I really started to get a grasp on how coding worked in ChoiceScript. It’s not much story-wise.

http://choiceofbox.com/CSComp2015/Cellia_Rosewood/mygame/index.html
This was my entry for the CS Comp of last year (2015). It’s pretty nice, but I haven’t really done anything with it since then. It features spectral lizard people.

This was a little thing I wrote to get to my aspired wordcount for the 2015 edition of NaNoWriMo. I might continue it if I need to boost my wordcount for this year’s edition, though I don’t expect that to happen.

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Heh. I appreciate this. Such innocence in that thread. Thank you for sharing it. :rose:

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Well, I was a relatively new face around here back then. :wink:

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@Doctor You WILL let me sift through your dead WIPs :smiling_imp:

@Eiwynn :grin: Thanks for the compliment!

@Lordirish Oh, wow, that’s a lot of junk to read through with no payoff. But thanks! Yeah, the concept is pretty fun, but I don’t think it works very well in COG. Maybe in java or something? I’m not sure. I have a HUGE folder filled with world building notes on that world-- all the differences between the gods, the different races, all of the islands and stuff. Even if I don’t make a game I’ll definitely use that.

At the very least, I’ll find a new home for Talliver. He was a fave.

@Cecilia_Rosewood Oh goodness! I remember A Princess’ Life.

I know exactly what you mean with over ambitious projects :expressionless: I think the very first WIP I made, which is lost to the sands of time, didn’t even have *goto. The choices just kept branching… and branching… and branching…

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What’s it with failed fairytale projects? :stuck_out_tongue: I have a couple of those too. I started on a list of my own dead projects and it ended up getting so very, very long.

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Fortunately for you there’s still future chances to shorten that list somewhat, eh? :wink:

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Yes. That involves discovering my motivation somewhere though.

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Julia Caesar! My first ever choice game, started because of a comment someone else made on the forum. I had such good intentions of actually finishing it. I have a second vignette written up for it and a few other plans jotted down. It was going to chart the life of Julia Caesar and her best friend, Marcia Anthonette, as Julia rose to power to rule the city. And their adventures included dealing with Hannah Bell’s attempted invasion, Julia’s jealous ex-best friend Junia Brutus, an invasion of Goths, and they met with Joan of the Arc, and helped her build a big boat to survive a flood. There was much silliness planned out. I doubt I’ll continue it now though.

I learned so much when writing it though. I remember my head hurting from trying to work out ifs, they just didn’t make any sort of sense to me. I think there’s a single section where multiple ifs matter and that plagued me for ages. It’s so simple now, thinking back on it but I just couldn’t work it out. I also couldn’t work out how to implement stats that I liked either.

Scales&Tales which I have a lot more written for than ever actually went up on the web. It’s a tangle of plots though, surrounding you raising a baby dragon, dealing with the aftermath of being jilted at the altar, finding your purpose in life, and possibly finding romance. While I know everything’s that going on, alas, writing it down’s a different problem. I could tell you all about it! I do want to eventually get back and write Scales&Tales.

Santa Claus! Just a silly thing I wrote where you become Santa Claus, and need to deal with a punning reindeer, elvish trade unions, snowmen, and other silliness. I’d really need a co-writer to get it finished, but no one else was interested.

PSI: Psychic Student Investigates! - It’s a game set in the future, with an amnesiac hero, who has psychic powers. They need to discover their past, while also unravelling various supernatural mysteries surrounding them. I’d planned it as episodic with a bunch of self-contained vignettes, and one over-arching storyline. I love the characters and I love the world.

I have a ridiculous amount of this plotted out. I have two of the vignettes almost done. But I’m terrible at actually completing projects. This is another one I do want to finish.

Seeking Snow - This one’s another that I have the plotlines mostly mapped out and would just need to actually do the hard work of writing the game. Snow White’s gone missing, you’re from another Kingdom, and have arrived in order to try and find her. There’s a number of other fairy tale characters you come across in your quest, all of whom have their own little stories to investigate. It draws inspiration from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Snow White Rose Red, Donkeyskin, Goldilocks, and Little Red Riding Hood.

I’ve also a few other projects. Actually I could dig out my notebooks and likely be surprised by how many ideas are there. Ideas are easy.

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I loved Scales and Tales! I was so sad when you set that one aside. :cry:

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Not necessarily dead, just epic boughts of extreme procrastination:

I actually started to tinker with this again, but I might do a Tarantino and do the sequel first due to the overly ambitious nature of my first foray into CSscript. I learned a lot over the years on these forums, noticing what works and does not, and the death nail for most WIP to me it seems, is when they are overly ambitious, which can get out of hand very quickly >.<.

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The amount of WIP’s I’ve made, my oh my are it a lot, and only half of them have actually gotten my approval and gotten on the forums.
Someone actually contacted me some time ago if he could take over one of my abandoned WIP’s, said yes, no reply ever since though…

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Oh my god, I wish this was a real thing that actually happened though. The reason I write is because I like something and can’t find it. If they would finish it for me… Pure joy :relieved:

The projects have all fallen under a spell… A 100 year sleep. Give it awhile :wink:

I love Scales and Tales! I wish you would tell me all about it.

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