It was pretty close, and when you stretched it across multiple monitors it would grow and grow. But I made some bad architecture decisions in the beginning that basically required more refactoring than I felt was fun.
I may revisit it some day. Doing “fake 3d” is a hoot 
Dude, I have a fat stack of notes for a squd-based “Sea Monster Hunters” game in my filing cabinet. I wrote it all feverishly after finally reading Moby Dick. Yes, homoeroticism is eplicitly in the spec. Maybe, somewhere out there, our ideas are looking up at the same bright star.
ETA: that was “squad-based” not “squid-based” I realize I left that ambiguous. Squids play a role, but to call them the foundation would be overly generous.
Like so many things, the assets for Manatee Quest and nightfall are lost to the wind. The original artwork might be in a filing cabinet in a storage unit 600 miles away.
Heh, and all the .js for all the animations, fades, z-indexing, bounding boxes, you name it, was hand rolled. A bunch of the character animations for nightfall targeted the IE6 js interpretor, and when V8 came out I had to rewrite a bunch of code cause it was too damn fast. Kinda like the Turbo button on 386’s.
I feel you. My two actually playable games were written in :deep breath: Flash (AS3). Even within flash, I still hand-rolled too much, and still do. One was an isometric shooter that was actually a love letter to a podcast I don’t really like anymore, the other is a thing I’d like to overhaul and make into a mobile game in Unity…cause, you know, another IDE/engine won’t disappear out from under me, right?
Vale sounds something like The Scouring of the Shire: The Game, but less perfunctory. More discovering and navigating the changed social undercurrents than gleefully booting unpleasant squatters out of your house.
Oh, I NEED to do this. DEATH TO DEAD PROJECTS. LONG LIVE THE NEW!
Some great ideas here - well, clearly more than ideas, but rather designs and prototypes (so many people think that all you need is great ideas and somehow the rest will happen on its own). One is these is not dissimilar to something I was working on myself and set aside - and have been meaning to get back to.
The problem is, the last 25% always ends up being 80% of the work… I know that’s sort of a game industry truism, but it does seem accurate - it ends up being fractal, with more work appearing the more closely you look at what needs to be done. I wonder if releasing a 75% into the wild and then using player interest as a means of generating the motivation to finish it isn’t a way to go. I see a lot of people do that, now.
There’s a webcomic that I read that hasn’t updated for nearly a year and a half, due to the creator working on:
The first two items have been done for awhile now, and the creator said about a year ago that they estimated the update to be 95% complete. Despite all of the work that has been done on it since then, the estimate still stands at 95% - they’ve just found more and more work to do on it, so it’s a different 5% that is still left to complete.
I thought I remembered reading at one point about a site someone had set up for the express purpose of being a dumping ground for game ideas that people didn’t actually want to do anything with. I didn’t imagine that, did I?
[quote=“beschizza, post:16, topic:98717”]This one in particular I haven’t give up on-- it’s just not game material, I think. I bet it would work better as a fake Krakauer-style article about finding the guy: diaries, odd photos, theories about what happened, that sort of thing.[/quote]The first thing that came to mind upon reading “game of watching Chris McCandless die” would be that your every action would lead to some unseen narrator throwing in random little factoids that would slowly accumulate, depending on your actions, into the final story of how your character dies. Example: “You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript New England town. Alexander Graham Bell was credited with inventing the telephone in 1875.”
I hope someday someone realizes Qbert MMO, since now that I’ve heard the idea, this is a game I really want to play.
with brighly colored and thoroughly adorable pixel art hedgehogs1
1. Morphologically normal hedgehogs, not sonic ones
Way to humble brag, Rob. Even your aborted ideas are way more numerous and awesome than anything I could ever think of.
Oh. My. Dawg.
#GET O’REILLY ON THE PHONE, STAT!!!
Or not
Unless you reallyREALLYreally like falafel.
“Hi Tim, it’s me, random-non-internet-sensation guy. I have this book you’re going to love. It’s titled Improving Art By Adding Hedgehogs With Photoshop.”
…
“No, yeah, that’s really what it’s about. I can send a draft manuscript, just let me know where to submit it. So what kind of advance are we looking at here?”
…
“Really, you should just take a look, it’s not…”
…
“No, really, but seriously, restraining orders aren’t called for here.”
I can pretend to be someone important and write some glowing reviews for l\lytimes.com
Well, I really do need to start work on a followup book.
…oh god, I know this feeling too well. and now I have a name for it.
