You may notice there's nothing here right now. That's not a mistake, I have literally cancelled/indefinitely delayed every original game I've worked on so far!
OOPS!
If you'd like to see what I was working on, scroll down to CANCELLED/ON HOLD PROJECTS below.
I've also submitted games to the Really Amateur Games Expo, a comedy-focused week-long game jam organized by the good people at Sonic Fan Games HQ (who also organize the Sonic Amateur Games Expo) wherein participants have one week to come up with a hilariously shoddy Sonic the Hedgehog fangame based on that years theme. If you're interested, make sure to check out everyone's submissions. There are some seriously talented people who participate in these!
Every so often, I get the urge to try and write. This usually goes quite poorly, but occasionally, I actually produce something that isn't a complete cognitive hazard. This is where you can find that sort of thing.
Okay, so I didn't make these, per se, but I still had to do some form of work to get these online, so that counts.
An Animal Crossing-like developed exclusively with the PS Vita in mind. In contrast to Animal Crossing, Welcome Back would be set in a city with a strong focus on social interactions with the city's residents. Welcome Back was quickly abandoned due to issues with finding elements that would set Welcome Back apart from Animal Crossing while still keeping it similar to that game, coupled with a general lack of available time. However, I'm still interested in revisiting this concept one day.
I'll be honest, this one was kinda doomed from the start. You see, I had recently picked up a PS3 to load up with homebrew, considering that most of the PS3's digital library is just completely inaccessible nowadays. One of the first games I loaded on there was Noby Noby Boy by esteemed Katamari Damacy developer Keita Takahashi, and it was amazing. A masterclass in mechanical minimalism with an impeccable vibe that remained fun even years after players around the world "beat" it.
After around half an hour of attempting to stretch my Boy around the entire stage as many times as I could, I thought to myself; "I need to make a game like this."
Enter 108 GB (And Counting!). The game revolved around the player meeting an as-yet undeveloped video game (depicted as a controller with a face, dangling from a USB cable) that was concerned that it wasn't big enough to be considered a "real" video game. As such, the Game would ask you—the player—to fill it up with 3D models, pictures, videos, music and sounds until it reached a pre-determined size (108 gigabytes was the default, but the player could change this to a smaller size to save on storage space.)
At it's core, I envisioned 108 GB as less of a game and more of an interactive experience, one that was personalized to each player. The prototype version used DuckDuckGo's special search syntax functions to open a random page from an asset distribution site (such as Sketchfab or Turbosquid), prompting the player to download whatever they were given. This would lend the game an element of surprise, since you weren't quite sure what you were going to be prompted to put in the game. I remember thinking during development that 108 GB would be well suited to being played on a livestream.
However, there were two teeny tiny extremely big problems with this concept:
I thought of a few ideas: Maybe the player has to keep the level optimized, with their actual real-world framerate acting as a gameplay mechanic? Maybe the player has to fulfill certain requirements, like having X amounts of Y asset type in each area they built. Ultimately, I couldn't find a way to solve either problem. Looking back on it now, it's more than a bit vapid of a game concept, so I suppose I'm glad I didn't pursue it further.
Project DVVD was a piece of interactive fiction that was essentially an expression/exploration of a rhetorical question I haven't been able to get out of my head for a while now: "Wouldn't it be fucked up to be a caveman?"
In Project DVDD, you would play as a billionaire who was stranded on a sentient, supernatural island. This island just so happens to hate billionaires, and it tells the billionaire that the only way to escape is to survive for a full month on the island. There's a catch, however; for every day the billionaire is on the island, they will physically age one year.
Body horror ensues. Not only does a distinct lack of things like antibiotics or disinfectant pose a serious threat to the billionaire's ability to survive even minor injuries, the flora and fauna of the island are completely alien, requiring the billionaire to quickly adapt to their new environment. On top of this, eldritch monsters would begin to roam the island after one week had passed, upping the stakes. One particular interaction of note involved sacrificing a limb to one of these monsters in exchange for the creature leaving you alone for a day, potentially allowing you to continue surviving if you could quickly treat your new wound.
Also, Teeth. A lot of really bad stuff involving teeth happens in this game.
When I was developing Project DVVD, I decided that instead of prototyping the actual game first, I would instead build an ultra-accessible framework for the game, and worry about the fiction part of "interactive fiction" later.
This was, of course, a catastrophic disaster of a move. One that ended up with me burnt out before I even began building the actual game, not mention that I didn't even know if the game was fun or not. While I'm still interested in exploring this game, I'd probably opt for bodging it together in Twine or TyranoBuilder instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
(please applaud my incredibly smart caveman-related metaphor please i promise it was really clever and funny)
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