I've worked on a lot of stuff I started on and then didn't finish for whatever reason (for whatever "finished" means, which may be vague). Some of them I'd like to get around to later on and some of them probably weren't a good idea in the first place. This post covers a lot of them, but definitely not all of them. I have way more stuff I worked on as a kid that I'd have to track down (if it still exists).
Net Puzzle Arena
Something I've wanted to do for a really long time was make an an online puzzle game collection. The primary motivator for this was that I wanted to play Puzzle League/Tetris Attack with people, because netplaying over SNES emulators didn't work very well and Nintendo hadn't put Panel de Pon on Nintendo Switch Online yet. The Switch wasn't even announced in the first place, actually.
Now Panel Attack exists, which also covers the goal of "do a good job at being online Puzzle League" pretty well, so that removes the primary reason I wanted to make this. However, another goal I had here though was letting you customize the different games you play in it, letting you change the playfield size and the number of colors, and add silly gimmicks. Stuff like Puyo but where you need to match 10 of the same color together instead of four. If you've played Petal Crash Online (which I did most of the code for) there's a whole bunch of extra multiplayer options that basically do this to Petal Crash, adding a whole bunch of silly gimmicks you can turn on.
I feel like the silly gimmicks are kind of the point here, and I would want to elaborate on that the most. I've had a hard time finding people at my skill level when playing puzzle games online (either I almost always lose, or almost always win, and the skill levels don't feel close at all) and I'd definitely want to make a project that's fun to mess around with in singleplayer in addition to whatever multiplayer features it has.
Trivia: Net Puzzle Arena's name is kind of a play on freepuzzlearena, which was a similar collection of open source action puzzle games.
GBA Wario's Woods clone
I really like Wario's Woods, and I'm not aware of any publicly available clones of it, much less any clones with online play. I was thinking it'd be fun to make a clone of it (with my own optional twists on it to make it more original) with my own characters, and have that be my original puzzle game thing. I have a lot of ideas for how I can elaborate on it and make it fancy, adding things like items or terrain you interact with in the playfield past just the bombs and monsters.
This clone was going to be for GBA, which felt like a good fit for the game (especially because it's a device you can't play SNES Wario's Woods on, though you can play the NES one), and then I was going to reuse the code for an online version on PC. After that, I could expand the online version to have more games, and it could do what Net Puzzle Arena was trying to do. This might be a good next side project.
DDR clone for NES
I saw someone else's attempt at a DDR that had inconsistent framerate (which is terrible for rhythm games), didn't have PowerPad support (if I remember right), and just randomly generated notes. So I wanted to try and do a proper DDR, and I got to the point where you can hit notes and be scored but I realized I would have to actually somehow get all the music to put in it, and that sounded really hard. Maybe I could organize that as a community project or something sometime. I've had little success attracting collaborators in the past, though.
I have noticed that I have a lot of fun solving the technical problems of how to set up an engine, but actually making the content for it can take a lot longer and have a much larger scope than I'd want to go for at the moment.
Thumby platformer game
I was working on a platformer for Thumby because I thought every device should have one. It worked pretty ok and I was able to get it rendering fast but the Thumby is so difficult to play (I have to use my fingernails) that I'm not exactly convinced I'd want to spend a ton of time developing for it.
Having to write smarter camera code to account for the small screen did act as a prototype for the improved camera I'd end up putting in Nova the Squirrel 2. It probably wouldn't be too hard to extend this to have some simple level elements to build with and leave the levels to someone else.
Game Boy version of FHBG
One of my early Game Boy projects was an adaptation of my first NES game: Forehead Block Guy. I thought it'd be a good fit because it's small and simple, and I could easily fit it into 32KB. I ran into a problem where the Game Boy's screen is a lot smaller than the NES's so reaction time is actually a pretty big problem, and it doesn't feel fair if enemies can fall on you from off-screen. I tried to add in little indicators that show where enemies are when they're off-screen, which did help a bit.
Berry game thing
I tried taking the FHBG port as a base and making a Nova game with it. So in addition to throwing blocks you can also burger surf? One innovation here was that I attempted to solve the reaction time issue by shrinking blocks vertically, so the level is made out of 16x12 units. This was done by using interrupts to skip the vertical scroll ahead every 12 pixels. If you can fit more level vertically, then you may get away with not needing to scroll vertically, and in that case there's much less of a problem with enemies falling on you from above.
I don't remember where the name came from - I guess I had some mockups that had Nova collecting strawberries or something?
This might have potential, though I'd probably want to work on the game design a lot more and make it more fun. And that 16x12 trick could be good for a more traditional platformer, which might actually be more fun than trying to make an arcade style one.
NES CHIP-8 interpreter
This is a CHIP-8 interpreter for NES, which opens up the opportunity to have Breakout running in this, running in PocketNES, running in Visual Boy Advance GX, running in Dolphin, running in Virtual Box. It plays Breakout, but it's not very polished and a lot of games don't seem to work and I never got them fully working.
I don't think there's really much use for this outside of the novelty of it, which wears off quickly. And I can see from searching online that other people made a better version. So I'd probably consider this project as having accomplished what it was supposed to do.
SNES microgame maker
At some point I wanted to make something like The Games Factory or WarioWare D.I.Y. for making simple SNES games, where you would place objects down on a map (in Tiled) and set up their behaviors with an easy programming interface. I used Blockly for the programming part, which I had set up to produce SNES assembly code. I tried to design it around hooking together pre-made behaviors that were each written in hand-written assembly, so only the glue between them had to be generated, which I thought would help with efficiency.
I abandoned this because I realized it was way too big a project for one person to tackle as a free hobby thing, and I would have to be free tech support forever for people using the tool if it took off, and I didn't want that.
gif of some example project gameplay
tiled level editing screenshot
blockly code editing screenshot
NES microgame maker
I previously attempted to do that idea on the NES, where I didn't get as far but it did provide a head start for the SNES version. It had a much more elaborate HTML based game editor though. It provided a bunch of premade graphics you could use to make a little game with, and this version was more focused specifically on making microgames.
Arrow puzzle game
I think I was going for something like Pipe Dream, but with Hannah and the Pirate Caves arrows, like I use in Nova the Squirrel. I wasn't really able to get this to feel much like a game with an actual goal. It would probably have to be a score attack thing, focused on trying to make arrows stay around for a long while, or hitting lots of targets.
Some other take on Pipe Dream could be cool, or maybe this idea could be refined.
Platformer puzzle jumping thing
I've been playing with Wario's Woods style stuff in the past before I decided to just clone it more directly, where you have a character moving around in the puzzle's playfield, but you have movement that's more free. I played with the idea of jumping, and picking up blocks to throw them, but it ended up being hard to be precise with it. I guess there's a reason Wario's Woods has you moving in discrete steps.
Various other projects
- At one point I was working on a tracker for Atari 2600 games, meant to use a music engine made by Paul Slocum
- Various IRC bot frameworks that didn't go very far
- Clone of a shareware Clickteam-engine game named Rot-Mos
- Various attempts at making what would eventually be Nova the Squirrel 1
