Most of you probably know the feeling of being very excited about a project. Maybe you know the feeling of extreme letdown by the lack of response from others when your project is unveiled.

Over the years, I have written several games. Each time it is the same - excitement followed by disappointment. I will go on to say that most or all of my projects have been trainwrecks in one way or another. My earliest efforts are laughable at best... my latest efforts are... well, when was the last time I finished something anyways? :D

In this thread, I plan to dig up some of my old games and/or demos and post them. Hopefully it will be good for a laugh or two. Maybe it will lead to discussion about what may have gone wrong during development and what ideas are good/bad or otherwise. Then again, maybe this effort is as ill-conceived as the games themselves and this thread is doomed to die a horrible, but quick death followed by maggots and other creepy crawlers.

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Pseudopods: http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/Pseudopods.zip

At the time of development, I had just purchased a Vectrex and was excited about playing around with my own vector graphics. The game is heavily inspired by Jeff Minter's Grid Runner on the Vic-20. It plays like a mix of Robotron, Solar Fox, and Grid Runner.

So what went wrong? Well, perhaps the graphics are too simple? Maybe the collect the dot genre is way overdone? Maybe the flashing screen and loud music and sound effects are abnoxious? Maybe it's just too twitchy? Maybe it's not twitchy enough? Maybe it's just 20 years too late? Maybe it's a combination of all these things.

Even though it didn't get as much attention as I had hoped, I actually enjoy Pseudopods more than most of my other games. Maybe I should be content with that much and claim that I made it for my own interests and no one else's? Yeah, that sounds good.

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Lunar Harvest: http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/LunarHarvest.zip

I've always been a big fan of Centipede in the arcade. Lunar Harvest was my poor attempt at an update to the classic.

When I wrote Lunar Harvest, I tried several ways to make the centipede behave like it's arcade counterpart. I managed to get the movement working, but then I was puzzled at how I should approach splitting the centipede in pieces when it was shot. I eventually gave up on an exact clone and threw together the mess that you see here. The music is by Kraftwerk - that much I like.

So what went wrong? A clone should either perfectly simulates the original or follow the proven formula while providing new elements that improve or add interest to the original. Lunar Harvest does neither. There are far better (and far too many?) Centipede clones available.

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Little Bill (demo): http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/LittleBill.zip

This is my first attempt at building game with a custom platform engine. There were many things that killed this game. I have the attention span of a flea. Level design bores me to death. This is the reason that most of my games are one screen arcade-type games. You may notice that I've recycled many of the enemies from Lunar Harvest - I'm soooo lazy! The platform engine I built sucks. Perhaps if I had kept it more simple, I could have gotten something better running. I wanted the character to be able to run, swing from vines, hang from cielings, swim, climb, etc. As I added more abilities to the character, more bugs showed up in the character's animation. The screen size is probably a bit large while the graphics are a bit too small. I wanted each level to have something unique... a puzzle or element that was not to be reused in another stage. I became frustrated with the engine's bugs and got bored of building stages. Finally, when I updated to MMF2, I discovered that it no longer supports the drawline object which I used in many of my games. Rather than rewrite those bits of Little Bill, I abandoned it altogether.

I spent some time with graphics, effects, and detail for cut scenes for the game. Apparently the new version of MMF2 now has a recorder of sorts that will make making these sorts of cut scenes easy.

Press 1, 2, 3, or 4 on the title screen to skip stages. Also, I noticed that the .gam file is 666kb - spooky! :P

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Sk8 (demo): http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/Sk8.zip

This is little more than a demo. I used to play a lot with the line object for vector graphics. There is no score and the stage never ends. Simply skate while avoiding obstacles.

I enjoyed playing with the collision detection. There is a pseudo 3D effect going on, I tried to think of a way to make it so that objects overlap, but so that collision is only detected when they are in the same plane.

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Yar's Attack: http://www.angelfire.com/indie/mojofltr/games/attack.htm

This was my lame attempt at a prequel to Yar's Revenge for the VCS. At first it was one stage (now stage 3). I drew inspiration from Moon Mine, an old speech enhanced game on the TI-99/4a. I also experimented with popping score graphics - inspired by Tempest 2000. When I was satisfied with the gameplay on that stage, I decided to "enhance" the game by adding two new (read: "half-baked") stages to vary up gameplay. Looking back, I really think I should have continued developing the one screen so that the game became more intense and varied as the player's score increased.

Lessons learned: Stick to one genre. Don't make sequels or prequels to other people's games and your game won't be compared and judged against the (most often far superior) original.

This version of the game requires Clickteam's Vitalize browser plugin. I'll have to see if have the original source for this one on a cd somewhere.

(Note: I'm surprised this angelfire page still exists! I don't even remember my old password! I wonder what else exists in those directories! I wonder if any of my old geocities accounts are still active. :/ )

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Solomon's Shrine: http://www.angelfire.com/indie/mojofltr/games/

This is the first game I ever made. It's also probably the worst. :) I ripped all of the graphics from the original Solomon's key games - I discovered soon after that the Klik community doesn't look to kindly on people who steal graphics. I used Klik N Play's default platform engine. One level is almost entirely a recreation of a level from the original game.

So what is the point of this game? There is no point. It is only significant in that it is the first thing I ever put together with a Klik product. It is to blame for everything that came after. Curse Solomon's Shrine!

This version of the game requires Clickteam's Vitalize browser plugin. I'm pretty sure I don't have the original source or a standalone binary anywhere.

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Ball (demo): http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/Ball.zip

This demo was my attempt at creating an interesting engine for a puzzle platformer game. I rather like the mechanics of everything except probably the hopping ball power-up (which uses the default platform movement in MMF). I had plans for at least one other power-up which allowed for free control over the ball - as if it were untouched by gravity. I fancied the idea of replacing the ball with a little moon man with a jetpack. Unfortunately as soon as I got the demo to a playable state, I remembered that I despise level design. I dropped the project as quickly as I began.

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Pixel Man, JIG Castle, and a couple of abandoned demos:

Last summer, I began working on a series of mini-games to give as a birthday present to Jay Bibby of www.jayisgames.com . The idea was to have five or six small games assembled with a Gameboy-like skin. The graphics would be kept simple to give them that monochrome gameboy feel. Why? I don't know, really... it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Pixel Man: http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/Pixelman.zip

This is a lame attempt at a Super Mario Bros clone without a lot of the features that made Super Mario Bros good. I was trying to keep gameplay simple so that I could quickly design more miniature games for inclusion. The result is less than desirable. Conclusion: Quantity < Quality. Don't rush game development so that you can flood the internet with crappy games. Pixel Man's only quality is the music, which was produced by Maniacs of Noise.

JIG Castle: http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/JIG%20Castle.zip

This one is a bit better than Pixel Man. It is a dungeon/puzzle game with features similar to The Adventures of Lolo or Zelda... :) Again I was faced with the boredom factor when it came to level design. Luckily, the game is short and the screen is small, so this wasn't too much of a problem.

The player movement is not as smooth as I had originally intended. There was a rather major bug that made it so that bridges didn't appear when pushing a block into water. I changed the movement to adhere to the grid which helped, but didn't squash the bug altogether. Again, the music is by Maniacs of Noise. Also, I was rather pleased with the enemy's AI.

untitled (racing demo): http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/road.zip

This didn't get too far into development before I became frustrated. I lost one of my older demos which had a rotating VW Bug graphic I had drawn and I wanted to recycle. It probably seems silly, but I was much too lazy to make another and so I quit developing the game. A few months later, a friend from the Atariage forums PM'd me with my old demo, so I have the graphics to finish the game if I ever decide to resurrect it from its untimely ashes.

The demo shows the way the road would have been drawn and is controlled with the cursor keys. Of course, this would have eventually been controlled by the game itself and the cursors left to steer the car, but I was still testing when I abandoned the project. It is as it is and as it is, it is a piece of poo.

untitled (time competition demo): http://games4noah.sitesled.com/trainwrecks/time.zip

In the forums over at The Daily Click, there was a 2 day competition to create a game with a "time" theme. Unfortunately had to work that weekend, thus adding an even greater time restraint (no pun intended). Still, I really wanted to participate... this is as much as I was able to muster in the time available to me.

I had hoped to get a Defender/Choplifter thing going on with maybe a bit of HERO. The idea would be that you had to fly into the site of a volcanic disaster and rescue the inhabitants therein.

As you can see, I didn't get very far before the competition was over. There is no volcanic danger, inhabitants to rescue, nor is there any point to the game's existence at all. I spent way too much trying to get that GPS system going... and even it is horribly implemented.

Since the competition, I believe I've worked out a better way to do GPS using the Viewport object in MMF2. Maybe one day I'll return to this project or do something similar. Till then... take a bite out of this horse apple. :)

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Up next: Probably more unfinished garbage that no one wants to see anyways. :P