Maybe here, including myself, have probably churned out a few incomplete and/or terrible games while learning the ropes. Describe the worst game you've ever made...(It need not be a completed one.)
1.Describe your game's general theme.
2.What made it so terrible?
3.What made you abandon it if you chose to do so?
4.(If you didn't follow the above route, what did you do to change it?)
5.Do you feel you learned anything from it or was it just a waste of time?
I'll start:
1. Game was a craptastic potpourri of ideas ripped from Golden Sun, Breath of Fire, and various smaller titles. Typical save the world drama with the hero being the epitome of generic protagonists. (strong silent type orphan boy who learns to fight from old guy.)
2. Zero coherent story. Essentially killing your way across the land (would be fun if that was the point) and trying to save the world from monsters. Plot points contradicted themselves to the point where once I sat down and played through it, I realized I had ended up becoming the bad guy by accident. (Killing all those people evidently makes you a mass murderer if they aren't clearly defined *bad guys*.) I tried to incorporate real world issues like poverty, war, politics, but it came out so non-directional that you felt like you were spinning your wheels (so to speak.) Classic case of trying to do too much without a written out plan. Storyline felt like a procession of mini-quests, with no unifying theme. Also, game was using only original RMXP graphics, no scripts, and my knowledge of eventing was so limited I had to have switches for every little action. Battles were either insanely long and boring, or balanced poorly, leading to spamming of healing items constantly. The mapping was so bland, chugging a bag of flour would have more of a flavorful kick than exploring the realm. On top of all this, I had MASSIVE eventing errors, and there were a few doors and npcs that would crash the game, give you endless free stuff, and one accidentally sent you to face the final stage of the game right from the beginning (since I hadn't learned how to make conditional branches properly yet.)
3. Horrible everything. I had altered so much stuff in the game, I found it easier to restart completely.
4. N/A (recycle bin graveyard)
5. I learned more from examining other people's work, and learning how to make scripts work. I did, from my own failures, learn an organizational trick. I break the world up into regions, and set the first map of each region to be a blank map with common game events like lights, doors, npcs, chests, etc. I give it a regional name, and add new maps under it/ I make the regions maps as sub-regions within this context, so I can bring up one region with all it's locations easily and neatly. I have all the events I need at the ready, and am able to find what I'm looking for rapidly.
Share with me your horror stories.