The Cave of Forgotten Prototypes

edited in Projects
*Adjusts monocle*<br><br>Thank you all for coming. I'm putting together an expedition, fine developers, of the archeological pursuasion. It will be crammed with potential peril, potential excitement, and perhaps also potential treasure. Indeed, I plan to venture into the Southernmost reaches of Africa for a grand spelunking quest! We shall delve greedily, deeply, darkly, recklessly far into...<br><br><br><img src="http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii48/Gazza_N/CoFP.gif"><br><br>It'll be dark there, so pack matches. Also whiskey. And lots of spare undies. There will be hardship, but along the way we may find some forgotten gems, or something mundane that was worthless long ago but may be worth exhibiting when we spit on it and shine it with our rock-torn, lichen-smeared sleeves. Also whiskey.<br><br>Uncle Gaz Needs YOU! He does! So let's gear up and sally forth! TO ADVENTURE!<br><br><hr size="2" width="100%"><br>
<i>But seriously. Looking through the site's manifesto, a little something
caught my eye: "To make games that we learn from. To make games that
are horrible mistakes that we're still glad we made anyway". So do you
have any of those? An old prototype or comp game that you may be keen to build on based
on current community response? A little something you whipped up and abandoned,
but may still be worth putting out there for the lulz? A prototype so bad
that it serves as a shining example to all developers of how to
do it oh-so-wrong? Even something you built years ago that you're proud of but
that people have forgotten? Post! You never know what may happen in the Cave...<br></i>
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Comments

  • edited
    Alrighty! If you're the intrepid explorer, then I'd be the ragged hermit you'd find halfway into the cave, that hasnt seen sunlight for a couple decades, and hardly remembers how to speak...<br><br>Presenting: Castle Adventure!<br><br><img src="http://www.nobleapps.co.za/apps/castleadventure/Image4.jpg"><br><br> This was done in 2005 / 2006, so it's all oldschool Delphi and OpenGL - none of your Unity whippersnappers. It uses good ol Vertex Buffer Objects to draw a grid of 3D tiles (walls, pillars, doors etc). Uses home-rolled collision detection (hence why it's a bit weird) and home-rolled lightmapping using baked vertex lighting!<br><br>The level editor was pretty cool too, but it no longer works, it had the lightmapping and it was going to have doors and levers for the character to trigger, each which would execute a LUA script to perform basic actions on the world, but I never got that far...<br><br>Give it a bash here: <a href="http://www.nobleapps.co.za/apps/castleadventure/CastleAdventure.zip">Castle Adventure</a> (Windows only - you know how it was back then)<br><br>Keys: Arrow keys for movement, Shift for sprint.<br><br>Note the extra-long extra-cheesy intro, the shamelessly ripped Quake 3 model and the dynamic lighting and shadows on the character!<br><br>
  • *maniacal laughter*<br><br>I found another old beauty from 2003! Please note this is NOT politically correct in any way, those without senses of humour, look away now.<br><br>Introducing: ZimWars!<br><br><img src="http://www.nobleapps.co.za/apps/zimwars/image1.jpg"><br><br>A real-time-strategy game in which you defend your farm from the war veterans! (pay no attention to the screenshot, the building owners are randomly assigned)<br><br>So the premise was that you'd have your farm house with a turret on top which you could control, and a bakkie with a gattling gun on the back which you could drive around. You'd then have a certain amount of time to build up your farm defenses before the war veterans arrive. They would spawn from the shanty town across the street from your farm and would attack you - zombie horde style. :D<br><br>Check out the very basic - non-finished, prototype which doesnt do much at the moment, but it has a COOL INTRO. (Notice the trend here?). Windows only as per usual.<br><br><a href="http://www.nobleapps.co.za/apps/zimwars/Zimwars.zip">Zimwars</a><br><br><br>
  • The cave of forgotten prototypes lies forgotten itself, it seems. Your party disbands and goes back to making lolcats and ragecomics. <br><br>Years of accumulated bitrot and TV snow fill up the entrance to the cave, never to be reopened again... Or will it?<br>
  • So that is where lolcats gets its content from... hmmm
  • I like this idea, but I wont be able to make a nice post here yet, give me a few days and I can asplode on this thread :3 Are games that didnt even get to working prototypes eligible?
  • Definitely! We need content! Fill er up!<br>
  • I present to you darkness<br>https://www.box.com/s/428391370e7c29aa155f<br>part of the fun is figuring out the controls.<br>I would suggest wasd to move<br>space to pick up stuff<br>i for inventory and e to activate stuff on the ground (if you're facing it)<br>you can equip a light source by moving it from your inventory to the little box in the bottom left corner.<br><br>death is currently away on holiday so you get to run around indefinitely<br>
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    My thoughts as I played:<br><br> - Okay I have a Fear and Hope meter, thats pretty sweet. I like how I'm just ambivalent about the future, I'm not getting my hopes up or anything.<br> - Flashlight ON<br> - I want to put this glass ball on the pedestal over there... <br> - Hmm it's not working, is this a fishbowl helmet? Gaaahh I cant do anything except chuck it away.<br> - Okay what else is around here<br> - The walls are less solid than they appear.<br> - Ooo purple numbers are coming off me, am I dying? <br> - Those numbers are disconcerting but I dont seem to be getting depressed yet...<br> - Lets see how far this map goes...<br> - Ah it's fear thats creeping up on me...<br> - Oh my god it's <b><i>full of clones</i></b>!<br> - ... what was that?<br> - Tentacles eep!<br> - I found a city! or what's left of one... <br> - The tentacles and shooting monsters are attacking me :(<br> - Light drives them away? thats pretty sweet!<br><br><br><br>
  • <p>Welcome to our new party members, freshly paradropped through a narrow crack in the ceiling! Oh cave-hobo of little faith. Fresh prototypes have appeared, rich for the picking!</p><p>@edg3: Go for it! A conceptual design counts as a memetic prototype. :P</p>
  • edited
    well other than the clones which I really don't remember(probably a map glitch) that sums up pretty much what I managed to put into the prototype at the time. the orb is another light source, which may have had significance in the future... perhaps.<br><br>adding prototypes<br><br>space rpg (colab with SycoSplat)<br>https://www.box.com/s/b75a9f768c48c6100456<br><br>comp 19 entry shinigami dairokken<br>https://www.box.com/s/577714f60cbce7c68e55<br><br>colab with karuji, panda quest<br>https://www.box.com/s/4fb0089fbbaddbde8d1c<br><br>edit links fixed (I think) thanks karuji<br>
  • Oy oy, Skink. Don't be shy - do a little write-up on each if you can so that people know what they're getting into! ;)

    I'll post a few of my own once I can stop fending off cave bears (read: "working").
  • edited
    Yeah yeah Gazza, you're just in this cave for the gold rumoured to be hidden at the back somewhere. Did you even bring a mining hat? Camping gear? A canary?<br><br>"cave bears" indeed! Show us some stuff! :P<br>
  • I had started working on a Grand Strategy Framework in Unity. Got the basic map loading down (sort of). Before getting bogged down with real life and not having time for it. However, I learnt a fair amount with trying to decouple the content from the program in Unity.<div><br></div><div>I have a <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/43996324/Grand Strategy/Grand Strategy - Build 1.zip">test build</a> which is basically the overview of the map and being able to select sectors.</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wPEU-VFQ_ms/TzJ-KWqEtFI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/w9JQDuusXNQ/s1600/WorldMap.PNG"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wPEU-VFQ_ms/TzJ-KWqEtFI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/w9JQDuusXNQ/s400/WorldMap.PNG"></a></div><div>The world map in game.</div>
  • <font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">@Nitrogen you shouldn't have said that. You are about to be bombarded with mech prototypes :P</font><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">Also Panda Quest :3 ! Oi Skink! The PQ link is the same as shimigami -.-</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br></div><div><font face="Arial, Verdana" size="2">Panda Quest is totally the game of ever evolving redesigned a dozen times. Which has totally been forgotten . . . Totally need to finish it some time.</font></div>
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    @Nitrogen: Lies! Lies and slander! See my shiny helmet? Marvel at my dead canary! Gawk in awe at my luxury five-star camping set!<br><br>Now let's go back a few years to December 2007, when I started making games.<br><br><b>Overseer Assault</b><br><br>My first real game. :')<br><br><img src="http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii48/Gazza_N/screenshot100-2.png"><br><br>This was built for the first Game.Dev comp that I entered, where the idea was to build a game that could by played by multiple people on one PC. I managed to... congeal a bugtastic little number called Overseer Assault. It was a turn-based game that had up to four players taking time-limited turns to play either the tower-defense-ish Overseers or the top-down-shootery Assault Team, the objective being for one team to eliminate the other. It got polished a little for the next comp, where it got a tutorial and its own simple map editor. I'm still shocked that I finished it at all.<br><br><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/gazzagamesrepository/Home/OA Win7.zip?attredirects=0&amp;d=1">Gettithere</a><br><br><br><b>Deathbringer</b><br><br>You talk about Gazzagames that were horrible mistakes that I learned from anyway, you talk about Deathbringer.<br><br><img src="http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii48/Gazza_N/weh.png"><br><br>Deathbringer was an ambitious attempt to merge a mech shooter with an RTS-style tech-tree upgrade system. The draw was that you could upgrade and refine your weapons as you played a mission, letting you adapt to your situation.<br><br>There was no Unity back then, and I had just discovered GM's 3D functions. Suffice to say I was rarin' to use all three of the Ds available to me, even though I didn't have the slightest clue what I was doing. I found a script online that let me import the .obj files I created in Blender, and got to work building a 3D game in a 2D engine. I learned loads: how 3D graphics worked (transforms, normals, UV-mapping, draw orders, how to fix z-fighting and why it happened, etc), I got to apply all the 3D trig I'd learned in high school (because GM had no functions for a third axis or matrix functions), and I even wrote a rudimentary combat AI. Oh, right - I got the weapon upgrade tree running only to realise that it was no fun whatsoever without a solid core game to support it. That was fan<i>tas</i>tic. The game also ran like crap.<br><br>The version in the screenshot is borked beyond my patience to fix, but I did release a playable version with a top-down chase cam instead of a cockpit view that still has all the aforementioned features intact. <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/gazzagamesrepository/Home/Deathbringer Open.zip?attredirects=0&amp;d=1">You can get that here</a>. Just hit F1 in-game to pull up the instructions. I take no responsibility for bugs.<br>
  • this gazza he thinks I'm shy, I just think people should explore without a map...<br>short write ups incoming, as well as relinks for usability.<br><br>Shinigami dairokken:<br>this is a top down shooter/spell caster thingy that was made for the game.dev comp 19<br>at the time I thought I'd done fairly well finishing it, on playing it myself now I was somewhat horribly confused trying to figure out what does what and kills what. unlike my usual stuff though with it being a comp entry it has a fairly good readme and a basic help screen (f1). I think it's meant to have a boss battle but couldn't find said boss on my play through (I also died a lot).<br><a href="https://www.box.com/s/577714f60cbce7c68e55" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://www.box.com/s/577714f60cbce7c68e55</a><br><br>Space RPG:<br>the prettiest of my prototypes (SycoSplat made some very nice planets)<br>not much in the way of gameplay but fly around in a space ship (top down 2d)<br>visit planets, dock at said planets then undock and fly some more.<br>readme covers the controls. this would have become a proper rpg at some point.<br><a href="https://www.box.com/s/b75a9f768c48c6100456" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://www.box.com/s/b75a9f768c48c6100456</a><br><br>Panda Quest:<br>as karuji says this game has been in constant change, this was one of the earliest prototypes.<br>play as a top down panda that can shoot poison barbs with the right mouse, and move around by left clicking.<br>Pick up stuff by clicking on it and quaff some red health pots with space bar. now go out there and kill some wild pigs (that happen to have a sonic attack)<br><a href="https://www.box.com/s/4fb0089fbbaddbde8d1c" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://www.box.com/s/4fb0089fbbaddbde8d1c</a><br><br>;
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