Unreleased games (17):
Vessel (2006)
Still (2006)
Passage/The Garden (2007)
Zeshi Creature Raiser (2008)
Hillel* (2012)
Aekiss/The Soul Mirror (2012)
Multimirror* (2014)
Plateau* (2015)
Zephyr 3* (2017)
Maskwearers (2019)
G.E.M…. Green Eyed Monsters (2021)
The Tomorrow That Never Was (2021)
Nightside Melee (2022)
ONYX (2022)
Jetz 4 homage (2022)
*playable demo exists
From 2016 onward, a lot of my ideas about creature raisers and social sim worlds start to coalesce. These ideas go back to the 2000s with Zeshi and the “Mystery Rainbow Game” referenced in an old blog. But the ideas didn’t come together until The Gamer’s Codex was written.
In hindsight I think I’ve already achieved some of these goals with other projects. Hillel and Multimirror became Iridescent Crown. Scary point-and-click ideas from Still and G.E.M. have been captured in Enoch Never Dies. It captures the feel of the artsy platformers Passage/The Garden too.
Summary of Unreleased Games
Vessel – “A platformer I am working on. I plan to make it the most challenging game in existence. The engine is complete, I’m currently working on enemies. After that, it’s on to making the 100+ levels, 20+ bosses and graphics.” – January 06, 2007
Still – “This is based on an older game I never finished, called “StillFrame”. It’s a 2d point-and-click game. The closest thing I can relate it to would be a 2d Myst. Currently, very little is complete except for the concept and graphics for two rooms.” – January 06, 2007
Passage + The Garden. There were two retro, artsy platformers inspired by Seiklus and Richard Marchand’s art, particularly his piece “The Garden”. Isis’s song “Garden of Light” was no doubt an inspiration as well.
Passage begins with the nameless main character seeking shelter in an unknown house during a rainstorm. Body, mind and soul were three powers you would gain as you explore the mansion.
I remember “soul” in particular let you leave your body and levitate to activate switches on the ceiling. The powers were yellow, blue and red respectively. The mansion had grey-blue stone as its primary color palette.
Passage ended by escaping the mansion and discovering The Garden, which would’ve been a sequel game.
Zeshi Creature Raiser
(earliest notes of a Chao Garden-style creature raiser from 2008)
Hillel (2010-2012) was the earliest playable version of the platform engine I used for Iridescent Crown and Enoch Never Dies. My oldest notes about it are from November 25, 2010. I released a playable demo in 2012, mostly focused on rainbow color effects in procedurally generated levels.
This demo seems to be lost. Two years later I released the Multimirror demo. I didn’t release another version publicly until IC on December 22, 2016.
Aekiss (2012) was my first serious attempt at writing a game narrative.
Medieval setting. Your character maintains the life of a thief and obtains a strange talisman from a gypsy one night. You begin falling into past lives whenever you have intense bouts of deja vu.
Then after meeting a past life that ended with you going to Hell, Aekiss appears. He takes your girlfriend and your talisman, and disappears, leaving you under suspicion for her disappearance. Meanwhile, your hellish past self aligns with Aekiss and begins destroying towns. Ultimately you are villainized and find yourself a wanted man.
The ending was actually pretty good, good enough to not spoil at least. it doesn’t shock like some of my stories, but it does surprise. And leaves room for more sequels etc.
The Soul Mirror (2012): Medieval setting, sequel to Aekiss. This was the first story I used “enchanted swords” in.
Multimirror (2014) was an early version of Iridescent Crown. The partner system and rainbow theme had already been designed, but it lacked the inventory system, options and general polish of the final game.
Plateau (2015), aka King’s Garden or MM2, is a platformer engine that branched off of Multimirror, and has some different features such as slopes.
Maskwearers (2019) was a game idea about a world were masks are the source of power. The God Mask and Devil Mask are worn by the hero and antagonist.
I really liked the concept but for some reason it just didn’t feel right to work on. In retrospect, it seems like another premonition I had.
G.E.M…. Green Eyed Monsters (2021): This was an idea for a horror game where a “jealousy meter” was the main feature, and steadily raised through the course of the story. The game has a very linear story-driven progression, like Silent Hill or 90s horror games.
The protagonist goes looking for his girlfriend and best friend at a party, and finds a hole in his basement. He descends and somehow ends up back at the party several times, the party itself changing mood and circumstances each time he returns. The protagonist is met with several insinuations that his girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend.
Eventually the party becomes a celebration of his girlfriend and best friend’s marriage. Then the girlfriend gets trapped in a videotape while a doppelganger takes her place, and the party resumes as normal.
There’s a heavy focus on the countdown to midnight, where only the protagonist can see his girlfriend trapped in the video that’s playing on the wall.
The Tomorrow That Never Was (2021)
This was a game concept mostly centered around the theme of past versions of the future. The game would likely be structed like a museum similar to Shivers, where different areas are devoted to different time periods and their predictions of the future.
As you move through the rooms, the time of the predictions would get increasingly more recent, until you have future predictions from the 2000s and 2010s.
But mainly I want to focus on 20th century predictions of how the year 2000 would be, where they were right, and where they were wrong. The eugenics-driven predictions of the 1920s for example.
You would be left to reflect on that before being presented with our latest predictions of the 21st century and beyond.
Nightside Melee (2022) would use the Aeon engine to bring together all my OCs from various stories in a smash fighting game.
ONYX (2022) is the original AMETHYST story, which would serve as the sequel to Enoch Never Dies. The gameplay would be similar – most of the story concepts involve a time limit – but I would bring back the fighting system.
Jetz 4 homage (2022) would’ve used the Iridescent Crown engine to recreate Shawn64’s classic indie game Jetz 4. You would have a jetpack and either follow missions or fight cops. But I realized I probably couldn’t match the original.
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