Your "dream" project that you've abandoned

Around the time I got into Doom modding (two, three years ago I guess?), I had a lot of really big ideas. Problem was I severely overestimated my own abilities and ended up with a whole bunch of empty plans that I'm still not able to make a reality. I haven't been able to set aside the time required to learn how to script and implement all the things necessary for it to work so the project remains untouched.

I'd have to search for the design document to remember most of it but from what I do remember, it was primarily story driven with action segments in between. It was meant to have dialogue trees and branching story paths, very RPG-ish. The working title was A Friend Who Won't Betray and a large portion of the plot centered around propping up the dwindling sanity of someone very close to you. As the story progressed, one thing led to another and it's revealed that the friend randomly offed someone in the town you're both staying at. The player was left with the choice to either stand by him (however unstable) or oust him to the rest of the community, both options carried repercussions of different kinds. The action sequences between the various story-centric levels were expressed through the player character's dreams, the different monsters and locations being influenced by the decisions made and the things witnessed while awake. Morally questionable decisions and unexpected outcomes lead to more guilt, meaning harder levels and more twisted monsters.

But again, nothing came of it. Abandoned before it became anything more than a whole lot of text in wordpad. All this was hilariously ambitious for someone who knew (and frankly, knows) next to nothing about the scripting required.

I feel like I'm currently working on that dream project and that I have to abandon it soon.

Fortunately I don't plan on making long maps, just a lot of new textures and it's just 9 maps. It's hard to even make 1 good map though.

I've abandoned mapping altogether. I wasn't confident in anything I made, so they went to the recycle bin. Ah it was fun while it lasted though.

No one will ever mistake me for a high-concept mapper, but I did have a dream project that was based on, IMO, a cool idea.

My original name for this project was Oldskool Gangstas. The idea was to put together a team of mappers who started, and uploaded, in the '90s. One of the people who signed on early -- all names are secret -- said he'd give me 2 maps if I changed the name to Old Dogs. I thought, "Hmmmm," as I envisioned a titlepic with 2 grizzled old cartoony dog-people in military uniform, chomping angrily on cigarettes as they gripped their assault rifles. Figuring we could find someone to do such a graphic, and very much wanting 2 maps by this individual, I put up mild resistance before I inevitably agreed.

At the time, I was full of confidence. I managed to create a team of 8 well-known mappers purely by working through PMs. I pressed them for maps of escalating difficulty, with E3 to be so difficult, "Players would rather commit suicide than play it again." ;D  Surprisingly, this admirable goal didn't go over so well. But that's not why the megawad died.

The team was put together in 2014, but as it turned out, all the mappers were extremely busy with work, other hobbies or major IRL concerns. I was busy with community projects, although I'd send out the occasional update promising, "Once I finish Map X for Project Y, I'll be ready to turn on the jets!" In the end, my jet stayed on the runway, and no one bothered to fuel it up. ;D

There was one team member who provided some maps, and he -- and his maps -- came on over to a new project that maybe someone in this thread knows about, heh. Also joining was the guy who came up with the name Old Dogs. I'm once again very confident, IMO with more reason this time because it's a much more casual affair with a nice long lead time.

As for Old Dogs, I still think it's a neat idea to get a bunch of codgers from The Doom Geritol League together, wind them up, and see what they can do. If anyone wants to run with the idea, be my guest, and I'll happily provide at least one map if you're willing. :)

As for the project described by Dobu, our esteemed OP, why not do just the Hell maps and leave out all the preamble?

In 2000/2001 I started an edge TC (like you do) based on the Vietnam war, it went through multiple version types and ddf rewrites but in 2007/2008 I knocked it on the head. Think I had 3 levels playable and a base camp you started the mission at etc. The weapons and enemies from the NAM game and textures + foliage from the Vietcong game. 

I still have it kicking around, however it will never be completed. Maybe one day I will make a one level zdoom map with the resources but then maybe not.

Also in 2001 I did a small release on Idgames, but I'd rather forget about that :-)

Old screenshots, even older that the last version I had created, however I can't be arsed to find it and fire it up just to take screenshots.

I could go on about these for pages and pages, as I frequently give up on dreams after early promise. A major one would be the full release of Virus, which stalled because I had all of the monsters made but didn't have it in me to work on textures at a higher level of competency and didn't want to just keep going with 10+ solid colours. I've been telling myself for years that I should just make a mega map using all of the resources and maybe more solid colours, or some sort of low-res texture set from some other source. Maybe I will, but I think the success of the faction as part of ZDoom Wars has kind of contented me with what I've done.

Another significant one was Phobus Doom, where I made 4 levels of E1 before doing a little demo release. Never bothered continuing on to complete the planned 10-map episode or the other three episodes I had in mind. I still have this, though, so I could work on it in some capacity, or reuse things. Tiny Pack 2 is in a similar place, where I could easily finish it, but just don't seem to want to. That had another 5 packs planned at one point, so maybe the ambition was too much to contemplate at a time where all of the rest of my projects were just community project map submissions and therefore over very quickly to immediate reward and feedback.

The other one that springs to mind is Takeover, which was a ZDoom project to make 5 large maps, do some sprite work and all sorts. I had a few clever things done, like a volcano with a vortex of sprited particles swirling inside it, or a lab with a crate stacking puzzle inspired by Metroid Prime 2 that made use of a ridiculously complex computer interface script I'd put together... This one I did give up on and delete as it stalled pretty quickly. I chose to reuse one of the ideas on the one Tiny Pack 2 map I made, which was using sound clips from Aliens in a radio message kind of way to have the sound a of a base going to shit in the background.

Basically, if it's ambitious and for ZDoom, I've not finished it.

All I have is an idea that will never happen (because it would require both talent and other devoted people to help) for a RoboCop vs. Terminator TC. It would be a TC in the vein of Blade of Agony, so...like a whole new game, with 8bit animatic cutscenes and stuff. 

In it you would play as RoboCop in future Detroit.  You would start out on your typical RoboCop day,  doing typical  RoboCop things,  like shooting random street thugs for whatever parking violations or whatever.  Then things would escalate, some criminal hacking organization is hacking an OCP facility storing enforcement droids.  Now they have an army of ED209s.  And to make matters worse, suddenly these freaking cyborgs from the future start appearing out of temporal bubbles all over town and wreaking havock!  So, yeah...you kill street thugs and robots and cyborgs as RoboCop with weaponry from both the RoboCop and Terminator film series'

But it's abandoned before it starts because I don't have he talent to make any of that happen, lol.  It's fun to dream about though.

I've got a mapset that was meant to be released as an episodic release. It was meant to be the prequel of my former ecplseii mapset, although thematically and gameplay-wise it was quite different. It had 10 levels done, then I formatted my PC and forgot to save the newest release. So, I have now only 3 levels from the whole set. (the first map was released as a bonus map for Nevasca).

I've also released 'Discovering the hell: the 4 worlds' (I don't remember the name lol). Originally it was meant to be a zdoom project with around 25 maps, with 5 different themes (5 hell, 5 snow, 5 forest, 5 'underwater' and 5 tech/space). During the process I got burnt out and released the set with 17 levels as an abandoned project. It got really bad reception lol (and it sucks indeed)

I always wanted to create an 'on-rails' shooter similar to that of classic arcade games Time Crisis or House Of The Dead. Since seeing some scripts existing that can force the player on guided paths while still being able to shoot etc (I know it's in Wolfendoom: Blade of Agony) I've been more tempted to try this out in the doom engine, but I'm always 'too busy for a new project' and in the times that I'm not I lack the motivational kick up the arse to do it.

If anyone else wants to take this idea just do it. I will be soooo on board for helping out and am certain I would love the end result. :)

Most of my maps and layouts were abandoned due lack of motivation, inexperience and no ideas how to finish map or fill those empty spaces. I wanted to build mapset which is set in weird dreams with hell and last map would be about wake up and learn that everything was real. Well, my priorities changed and this idea looks kind of silly. 

PUREDOOM--it was going to be a 32 level megawad by myself.  I've made five maps for it and released 4, the other map is temporarily out of limbo for another project.

I think what killed it was going online in late 97 and seeing what was released already; that and the name of the project has a lot to live up to and if I didn't deliver I'm  sure I would have been ridiculed off the internet.   There were also technical limitations on my end due to lack of knowledge and limited artistic ability, but I think mostly cowardice has prevented it from moving forward (my current excuse is Bethesda will fox me for using the name Doom).   I still have my notes and found a place that might be able to recover what I have on zipdisks....so its not completely abandoned, it's just mostly abandoned.

So, where do I start ?...

JURASSIC PARK TC
I had a Jurassic Park TC , based in the first person segments of the first Jurassic Park game for the SNES.
I had the idea of making a something like an escape of the island thing with this resources.

But it was getting really complicated to rip the sprites with a decent quality (considering the resolution of the snes and double pixeling) , so I kinda lost motivation to continue with this project. Also there was no weapon sprites in the game.

SHADOWRUN TC

I had the idea of remake the maps from the sega genesis/megadrive version of Shadowrun.
And try to make some of the mechanics of the game like, magic , shops , leveling system, missions, etc.

This project died pretty quickly in the moment when I realized that it was going to be a massive amount of work to do something as ambitious like that and I didn't have at the time and the skills to make a lot of it .



So... I don't know if count this one as abandoned but I have a Zombies Ate My Neighbors project on hold, so I guess it fits. :D

ZOMBIES ATE MY NEIGHBORS TC
I had so many years ago this idea while playing this game of "How zamn would look in a first person perspective??"

(Couple of videos also...)
 

My only problem with this is that I want to improve the quality of the mod overall, so I'm gonna redo most of the weapon sprites to feel and look like the original weapons , and I need to redo pretty much all of the wall textures of the game (from 32x64 to 64x64), so ..... It's going to take a while :/

P.S: Thanks for reading uwu I tried to put some stuff in spoilers so it isn't that heavy to load

It's very nice to see the screenshots and other fun details of some of the interesting ideas and concepts that had to be abandoned. It reminded me of a Doom 3 project that I once upon a time had to abandon, so I took the liberty of creating a similar thread in the Doom 3 section.

20 hours ago, Dude27th said:

JURASSIC PARK TC

I had a Jurassic Park TC , based in the first person segments of the first Jurassic Park game for the SNES.
I had the idea of making a something like an escape of the island thing with this resources.

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But it was getting really complicated to rip the sprites with a decent quality (considering the resolution of the snes and double pixeling) , so I kinda lost motivation to continue with this project. Also there was no weapon sprites in the game.

That Jurrasic Park project looks sweet.  I haven't thought about that game in years.

On 3/2/2018 at 4:36 PM, Eris Falling said:

It's almost on-topic, but "Mysteries of the Duat" is the name of a scrapped TNT:R MIDI that never really got off the ground, heh. I think I was too new at the time to be branching out into doing world music and stuff. I automatically think of it though whenever I see the Duat mentioned.

 

God Save Me sounds like a really cool concept, satisfying the interest that many have in seeing Hell depicted in different ways. Seems like you could get a decent-sized WAD even with the filler cut out.

 

Anyway, I started working on an 11-map GZDoom episode called Eridian Twilight in 2013. It was set on a certain ice-covered dwarf planet in the outer solar system and was meant to utilise lots of what UDMF had to offer - not unnecessarily bloating things, just designing as I saw the worlds in my head.

Of course this was way above my level of ability and I didn't even get close to finishing the first map so I scrapped it. Since then UDMF has advanced even further, I wouldn't stand a chance.

I'm still proud of some of the weapon sprites I drew though, considering I have like zero artistic ability.

You're not kidding, those are some fucking fantastic sprites.

I've got one large abandoned project and two other massive projects that I've shelved, but I wouldn't say that I've abandoned them (well, at least not yet). I've already posted about my large abandoned project a couple of times, and because I'm lazy I'm just going to copy-paste those posts here:

I originally posted this here.

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I mostly self-taught myself to use Doom Builder 2, so my first map was simply just a test. It was a linear sequence of square rooms with the SHAWN textures on the walls, I hadn't figured out how to resize the grid yet so all the geometry was on the default 32X32 grid. At one point I tried to make a lift and couldn't figure it out, so I made a staircase instead that had a top step that would lower when walked over... It ended with John Romero and was mostly inhabited by Nazis for some reason. It also contained walls mistakenly split into multiple linedefs when they should have been one. I still have it somewhere on my laptop, along with all my other terrible early maps of mass terrible.

 

I eventually planned out a full megawad that I called the Invasion of Hell (original originality!), which I am glad never got anywhere near completion before I abandoned the project, as every single map I created for it is a broken piece of trash. One thing I was quite fond of in my early maps for some unknown reason was something I called "super secrets", which were basically Wolfenstein based secrets full of Nazis that did not appear on the automap or count as a secret. All they did was put more strain on the node builder and make it way harder to 100% complete a level.

 

I've learned a lot about proper map design over the years and am proud when I see how far I've come. Now I just need to finish my current megawad project so that I can publicly release my first mapset!

I originally posted this here.

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Shortly after I first started making my own maps when I was like 12 years old or around that age, I had a vision for my own Megawad! I dubbed it "The Invasion from Hell" (original originality!).

I came up with my own sort of story for it:

On Mercury (this wad's version of the planet would be literally made mostly of liquid mercury) for some reason, Doomguy is deployed to find out what happened to the series of UAC bases after they had all unanimously gone dark, a rescue team of twenty marines has already disappeared after reaching the planet. Upon reaching the planet, Doomguy is immediately attacked by demons and pretty much solves the mystery in ten seconds (the intermission screens would still act like there was some sort of mystery). After defeating all the demons in the first base, Doomguy finds ten of the twenty marines hiding in a holding cell (I don't know what my logic behind them still being alive was when I wrote it). Now Doomguy must fight his way from the first base to the second base, crossing bridges and rivers (the geography of this fictional version of the planet was very inconsistent) along the way. He eventually made it to the second base, finding it partially transformed by the demons (original originality!), when he suddenly got a message from an orbiting space station informing him that a Demon Spitter (Icon of Sin) had been detected on the planet beyond the second base. After clearing out the second base he found the other ten marines hiding in a holding cell ("HOW ARE THEY STILL ALIVE AND HOW DID THEY GET THAT FAR?!?", My 18 year old self asks my 12 year old self), the marines tell Doomguy where the Demon Spitter is (and piss off or something, I didn't come up with any explanation as to where they went or what they did after Doomguy finds them). After clearing out the second base, Doomguy descends upon the Mercuric surface and trudges his way to the Demon Spitter. After killing it, I don't remember what happens after that I haven't read the script since I wrote it six years ago.

 

~The End.

 

Now this completely original plot would probably work if there were some decent maps to back it up, but there simply wasn't. I was like 12 at the time and had only just started mapping. I had no knowledge of how to combine maps into the same .wad, I didn't and still don't know how to alter the text intermission screens (I have never messed with the actual code, and don't plan to anytime soon), I distinctly remember one of the maps being completely broken due to some kind of bug that caused everything to noclip past a certain point (I now think it may have been something to do with the map being too close to the grid boundaries). All my maps had shitty layouts, nonsensical texture work (thank god for auto align), One map was in the shape of the Spider-Man logo for no particular reason (and no, it was nothing like the map in E3 that is shaped like a hand, that map was actually good, this one wasn't), one map contained a room that was shaped like a child's primitive drawing of a boat for no reason, one map was a castle populated entirely by Cyberdemons, one map was a shitty maze that was very poorly laid out, one map was a bridge overlooking a skybox made of the face texture scrolling left because I didn't know how to make a proper skybox and the list goes on with shitty maps made by a person who was still just beginning and had no idea what they were doing at the time. I still have those maps, I might put them together and release them as a sort of record of how far I've come (that won't happen until after I release an actual mapset, my first public release won't be to

tal shit!).

 

Here are some screenshots from MAP19: CYBERDEMONS CASTLE in The Invasion from Hell, DANGER! SHIT INCOMING!:

Spoiler

A bird's eye view of the map, which for some reason was built on the grid boundary...

 

The starting area... Jesus it looks shit...

 

This map, as you should be able to tell, is very bare and devoid of anything interesting...

 

An Icon of Sin guards the blue key for no particular reason... It isn't functional or anything I put it there as decoration... Also note how the yellow key markers stretch to the top of the room... I did not at this time know how to delete sectors and make them solid, so I must have consciously decided to lift them to the ceiling...

 

Not sure what the hell I was thinking when I put this ungodly drop here...

 

When I first started making maps I for some reason thought it would be cool to add what my 12-year old self called "super secrets". They were all Wolfenstein themed, did not appear on the automap and did nothing more than make it way too hard to get 100% kills or items. They didn't even count as regular secrets! Also note that this is the only part of the map to contain a Cyberdemon, in spite of the map literally being called 'CYBERDEMONS CASTLE', so if you didn't find the super secret, you would not have fought one!

I won't describe the two projects I've shelved in any major detail, since this post is already too long, but the main reason I've shelved them is because I don't have the necessary skills yet and don't want to burnout trying to work on something I don't have the capability to accomplish yet. The first project is for Doom, and was actually inspired by one of the later maps I made for The Invasion of Hell before I abandoned it. It'd just be a standard Megawad much the same as what The Invasion of Hell was meant to be, just with actual competency in the general design. The second project is for HeXen, and I believe myself to have an amazing idea with lots of potential if it can be pulled off correctly.