6 Flash Ideas I Really Should Have Finished
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008I’ve started a bunch of games that I never finished, either because the ideas sucked or because I didn’t have the motivation to finish them. Here are a few of those ideas:
1) Lion, Sheep, Grass: Sort of like Rock/Paper/Scissors, but with more cartoon animals. The aim of the game would be to create a balanced environment. Not easy when the lions keep eating the sheep, the sheep keep eating the grass and the lions keep dying of laziness when they sleep in the grass.
It didn’t work out because my deliberately poor cartoon sheep were so undeliberately poor that I gave up trying to redraw them.
2) FlashTower: I probably should get the motivation to finish this. A lot of the groundwork is already done. It’s based (unsurprisingly) around the old game SimTower. When I first started this game, I’d never played SimTower. I just assumed it was like SimCity but up instead of along.
Seemed sensible enough. Only once I actually played the game did I realise SimTower was actually pretty crap and wasn’t nearly as fun as I’d imagined.
3) Orb Avoidance 3: After the success of Orb Avoidance 1 and 2, some people said I should continue it into a 3rd one. I don’t know what to add in the 3rd one. The first was all about the gameplay. The second one was all about appealing to the people that didn’t think much of the simple style of 1.
I tried 3D Orb Avoidance. I tried making Orbs interact with each other to explode more colourfully. I tried having the player shoot the orbs through hoops and doing tricks. I guess I could just make it 1+2 (=3) and have it pretty and with enhanced gameplay.
4) Roboty-Thing: I’ve always wanted to make one of those games where you have to write some block-code and watch your little robot blindly enact the instructions until it completed them or fell off a cliff.
My first plan was really complex. I created a “robotic limb” editor, where you could set up a bunch of “motors” which rotated joints of a limb, letting you extend the limb or pull it in. It mostly worked, and was pretty fun to play with, but aside from that was pretty useless.
I then decided to skip the physical designs and let the user equip a humanoid robot with weapons and then have them sense/react using the code blocks. It sounds cool, but it’s the kind of system that would be so easy to abuse with “the best” technique that beats everything.
It was going to be multiplayer, too.
5) Sword Smash: This is actually pretty much completed. The entire combat system is done, I just never wrapped it up into a game. It’s a most-controlled melee game, where the weapon was swung around using the mouse (though not fixed to the mouse, more cunning than that).
Depending on where it came into contact with the enemy it’d do different amounts of damage. Some weapons were long and thin (aka, spears) which you could use to stab through the slot between helmet and shield. Some were big and heavy, which you could swing hard straight into the helmet to knock it off leaving them exposed.
You’d also control your shield with your mouse, which meant you couldn’t just keep attacking. You had to use the shield to defend yourself and then tactically swing back.
It’s uploaded to my Kongregate profile, but it’s not finished and it’s not a game yet.
6) Death Worm: You played as a giant man eating worm and went around smashing buildings and eating people. ’nuff said. 90% finished, technically not abandoned. I really should finish this one some time.
I’ve got a Flash folder with 324 files in it, so there are bound to be way more of these kicking around that I’ve forgot about. Unfortunately, I’ve only got them on my laptop at the moment as I recently had problems with my HD.