Incomplete projects

Just been digging through my projects folders. Many unfinished things (all fully 3D in Blitz3D):

Adventure game
Platformer game
Breakout game
Carrier command
Chaos remake
Jagged Alliance 2-type game
Poker game
Supercars-type game
Thrust-type game
Advanced Lawnmower Simulator remake

I suppose if your heart isn't in it to complete something, it's just never going to happen.

What's keeping me to finish something is the endless urge to have the ultimate engine, since I want endless possibilities (all of which are small on their own, so you tend to wish to support 'em).

As I mentioned on another thread I've got so many incomplete projects it's not funny... Most are largely complete too, they just need the final push and fluff... Oh well!

Think there's a fairly recent thread listing loads including some of mine. In fact I recall looking at the ratio of complete to imcomplete :-)

I have two incomplete projects, or rather I should say that I have two game ideas that are constantly evolving, and have been doing so for about eight years. I return to them again and again, often redoing my work as my skills improve. They're both ambitious - perhaps, no, probably, too ambitious.

They're incomplete but not abandoned. Unfortunately reality and commitments always get in the way of me making any real progress. This is rather annoying because I've reached the point where I'm certain that I could do my ideas justice - or at least create a game that was well written and pretty. But that's life.

I think what demotivates me is, say you're doing a typing skills game, you think "I know, I'll see what the competition is like on Google" and you get about 2000 results for software that does exactly that. Ok, so 99% of it is probably rubbish, but it's still quite demotivating. If you want to launch a game / product againt well-established, high search engine ranked products, you're going to find it tricky unless you use word of mouth and publisher power to squeeze into the market.

Me too, my shared 'programming' directory now has more subfolder icons than can fit on a 1280x1024 average nautilus/explorer window, totalling about 3Gb!! :(

Mabe its time for some burning down.

i have none unfinished projects. on my harddrive there is just one game, and its still in development. so, ok, its some sort of "unfinished" yeah ;), but it grows every day...

this is a fun topic :)

i've definately had many successes, but here are some of my biggest unfinished/failures :|

- alteration of blitzmax build code to gain method overloading through a preprocessor type substitution. worked out the compile system but when it came time to start parsing parameters i stopped. i still think my concept is sound on this one if anyone cares to hear it and is interested in trying it to take it all the way :)

- enhancement to blitzmax to manually decrement the internal ref counter to be able to kill cyclic refs

- enhancement of blitzmax to allow compiler directives to MingW

- pulling of mesh loading code of irrlicht into its own mod for general use by any 3d renderer (speed was the big reason i stopped work)

- native blitzmax spheretree collision system. i still think a generic, renderer-independant collision mod would be totally groovy and extremely popular. just not enough experience in that area :(

- native blitzmax conversion of irrlicht. what was i smoking?

- conversion of G3D rendering engine to blitzmax

- gimpact mod

- newtongamedynamics mod

- bullet mod

- opcode mod

- ode mod

- iB3D mod (unfinished but works well and still in development)

:) wow that was an interesting trip...

to many to discuss..im a failure

A lot of my ideas and games don't get further than a text file which starts off on the desktop as ideas get recorded for whichever game takes my fancy before I eventually shelve it in the dreaded 'Game Design Folder' which is a graveyard for all the ideas that never made it to prototype.

I have about 10 incarnations of the same basic game engine as it sort of progressed and jumped around, adding new advances as I went along. I'm still working on it. :-)

I have quite a large number of `experiments` which are small programs that just show an example of doing a particular algorithm or technique, which I guess you can say are not finished products at all, but they're useful as a reference.

I haven't yet finished any game in Blitz, but I'm working on it. There are quite a lot of games that I want I create, amongst other things, but I have to get the engine up to snuff first.

Actually I take it back, I did start a scorched tanks game in Blitz on the Amiga, got it to scroll a large landscape but didn't get any further. And I made a fruitmachine game which was sort of almost finished, except the graphics were very basic.

Sounds very familiar. I've got game folders which literally just have a two page text file in them describing how the game will work and how amazing it will be. And that's about it. There are some playable games, just lacking in sound effects and music, but I get bored once I get the basic game loop to work, I can never be bothered writing the main menu, or high score table logic.

@Caff
Do you have any screenshot of the adventure or how far did you come?

I have various compilers/interpreters and some vms, for different languages. Mostly basic/pascal/c based, but a few lisp ones too.
Most of them are in a semi functional state, where i have either a compiler or vm....

Now i just need some unfinished games that i can use some of my unfinished scripting engines in ;)

I got stuck on the scripting (particularly how to handle multiple events happening at once). And the amount of content I'd need to create just plain frightened me...

Hmm did you also investigate and try out tools like Wintermute for instance or what was the reason you started coding your own engine instead?