Cutting Room Floor
Last time I made a post about all the pet projects I've made that people might have seen online- but what about all the ones that didn't get that far? Here in no particular order are a few of the ideas I never quite got off the ground; obviously I can't and won't list everything but hopefully these are some of the more interesting pitches of yesteryear- and yes, a few of these may or may not be doubling as pitches because I'm gauging interest, so sue me!
*Age of Shadows - The third entry in the Ages series was going to revolve around folklore, cryptozoology, and UFOS.
Something I don't think I mentioned in my last post is that each sequel installment for Age of Fire was meant to represent an alternate timeline where one of that game's four sapient races won the war. Age of Aether was what would happen if the Ubaan took over Luenra, evolved into modern humans, and founded a medieval-era civilization.
Age of Shadows was going to be what happened if the Dryll won. Compared to AoA it was going to happen much farther in the future, at a period roughly equivalent to the 1800s. In spite of their defining victory the Dryll had actually been absent from Luenra for most of this time as they'd gotten their hands on Ur'Thak's spellbook, learned the same reality-warping magic the humans did in AoA, and curtly proceeded to accidentally warp themselves to another dimension. This left the title for world rule wide open all over again, and with one less competitor to deal with the Ubaan managed to win out that war and took carte-blanche of Luenra, advancing even farther technologically than they did in AoA.
The main conflict then kicks off when portals generated by the Dryll's more advanced, otherworldly descendants open up portals across the realm, letting in Legends and races from other realities. The four playable races this time would've been totally foreign, not related to the Luenran ones at all, and based on "real life alien encounters".
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| Enter: the Potosi sheep-slayer, the Zanfretta aliens, the Palos Verdes brains, and the Garson invaders. |
The Legend roster was set to include Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, the Beast of Gévaudan, Mongolian Death Worm, Flatwoods Monster, Sheepsquatch, Cuero, A Melonhead / Dover Demon creature, a mammalian amalgam of Congolese "living dinosaurs" called the River Stopper, an upright lizard called The Relic based on stories of carnivorous "dinosaurs" in the western United States, the Ningen, a NOPE-style biological UFO / "Rod Queen", and the fearsome critters Hodag, Roperite, Tripodero, Dungavenhooter, and Agropelter. A new portal/teleporting mechanic was also going to be included.
*"Godzilla Hero Shooter" -This is kind of a weird one cuz it's a project I spent a ton of time thinking about (I was really into it for a span of a few years) but wrote down almost nothing about it and never felt confident enough to share with friends. Basically the idea was to do something like Overwatch (or more appropriately now, Marvel Rivals) but with stylized Toho Kaiju. The tone was going to be wacky and chaotic with cartoony, SD/chibi style monsters that moved fast and had regenerating hotkey abilities like super boosts, beam attacks, and cloaking. For the sake of roster and moveset options I wanted series regulars like Rodan and Mothra to have non movie-specific designs. Godzilla himself would have functioned differently because of how many options and cameo options there were: my plan was to have 3 or 4 specific iterations with distinct body types that would then have a list of interchangeable skin/variants, so for example "the slow tubby one" might be, say, GMK Godzilla by default, but you could swap him out for Marvel Godzilla or Hanna-Barbera Godzilla.
*Godzilla: The Second Age - A tiny blip even on my radar, so I'll be quick. TSA was just another teenage fan-fic I was going to write at one point but didn't, which is probably for the best, because it was a teenage fan-fic. That said one thing about it has endured in my memory as something that might've been worth exploring. Instead of going the usual route where big monsters stomp on buildings and endanger mankind I wanted to write about a world where that conflict had already come and gone, chiefly because I had one burning question on my mind: what do giant monsters do with free time?
How does something like Godzilla behave on a day-to-day basis when Tokyo's already flat, when the defense force is no more, when King Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla and Rodan are all dealt with?
Does he wander the whole planet just because he can or does he pick a specific territory because he likes one environment better than another? Does he care about things like humidity and temperature? Does he long for the way thing used to be, or can he change his mind about things and adapt? What about food: Godzilla's body runs on radiation and probably doesn't require traditional nutrition, but does he ever eat things anyway? Does he have preferences? A palette? What about an instinct to hunt?
Can a kaiju with nothing to do get bored? Can it be under-stimulated, feel ennui, be depressed? What would something like Godzilla do to fix that, just romp around and play like a big rowdy animal? Does he fidget? Does he get the zoomies?! Is that what destroying cities is?!
Maybe it's more complicated than that and Godzilla's intelligence is more akin to our own. Maybe he forms routines not simply out of repetition and habit but because needs to? To stay sane?
Does he ever go looking for other Godzillas or is he content to socialize with allies like Anguirus? How does that friendship work...? Two intelligent species that have no generational history together, no shared social cues, no written or spoken language, no etiquette, no society, no innate understanding of one another. Are such profoundly foreign beings even capable of forming deep bonds, or does that chasm of interference simply make their relationship that much more wondrous and beautiful?
What happens when you have a entire globe populated by everlasting and almighty creatures that all have to grapple with these questions? Do they keep fighting like before just because they're frustrated and need to lash out? Do they distance from each other and live solitary, sovereign lives in different territories, kind of like what happened in Monsterland? Do they become a population of diverse, one-of-a-kind animals that never reproduces or evolves- do unnatural creatures in an unnatural setting somehow become the new norm? Is it possible that they, with their seemingly infinite lifespans, have the capacity not to physically evolve, but to mentally advance? Has picking something up and using it as a back-scratcher ever crossed Godzilla's mind? Would he ever reach a point where he might use tools regularly or build things? Can a random assortment of endless endlings with varying levels of intelligence ever, purely because of how long they've had to figure things out, form something roughly comparable to a civilization?
Have I asked enough questions?? Are you sick of seeing question marks yet?!
Right. Moving on, but if you want to read some post-apocalyptic Goji stuff that isn't so obsessive and actually exists, check Godzilla: Cataclysm from Cullen Bunn and Dave Wachter at IDW Publishing.
*"Zero G" Code Red -Another idea was to just do Code Red again but without Godzilla. My slinky angsty theropod could be his own thing, the story would be free to go in whatever direction I wanted, and nobody would feel I was committing fandom heresy. That all sounded good at the time, but of course my feelings toward Code Red and who I was when I wrote it changed so much over time that it later lost its appeal.
For what it's worth, though, I was planning on doing something more urban and futuristic for the reboot. Think Godzilla: The Series meets Batman Beyond. Lots of neon lights, flying cars and laser guns, genetic mutations. The new "Red" creature was going to live in the sewers of a mega-metropolis.
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| Coming soon to a screen nowhere near you! |
*"The Godzilla Show" -An idea I entertained for a few months in 2022:
I wrote a few short, 2-3 sentence episode descriptions to get an idea of what kind of stories I could tell and how the characters' personalities would bounce off each other, but never went any further than that.
*Monster Island Simulator - I also considered taking the premise from the above idea and repurposing it as a video game pitch: a building and management sim like Zoo Tycoon or Operation Genesis, but with kaiju. Players would be put in charge of their very own legally distinct Monster Island, an uninhabited blank slate where they would build high-tech containment facilities, habitats, and zoo-esque enrichment toys. Keeping each monster secure and contented would be the player's main concern, as any kaiju that gets too restless becomes likely to break free and make for the mainland- where it can cause death, destruction, and lawsuits that could cost you your job. Each monster would be a unique creation with its own temperament and requirements- some have to be kept in solitary confinement or even stasis while others need large territories to roam, some are safe to house with other monsters but only certain ones, some can even be pacified and released back into the wild. No one knows ahead of time how these monsters operate so it's up to the player to observe and experiment, learning as safely as possible through trial and error what makes each one-of-a-kind mutation tick and how to best nullify whatever threat it presents to the world.
*Terra Monstrum 2 - 15-ish years after "The Second Age" I revised that post-apocalyptic Godzilla thing with a less (annoyingly?) philosophical approach. I actually made a post about Terra Monstrum 2 over on Tumblr already so I'll just link you to that and be brief, but the short version is this: the sequel was going to focus on the rivalry between Godzilla (revived in the distant future) and Ghidorah (the new King of the Monsters and ruler of Earth) in a Hellish, neo-Hadean era type setting. It was also going to have a more complex human story, featuring the remnants of civilization hiding underground and an international space station hiding behind the moon trying to re-establish contact without alerting Ghidorah. I outlined a couple different versions, one with obscure classic era kaiju like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth, both with a cast of villainous new monsters to serve as Ghidorah's minions.
*King of the Monsters III - War of the Monsters wasn't the only kaiju fighting game I wanted to do a fan tribute to. As a child of the 90s, I actually have just as much if not more of an attachment to SNK's long abandoned King of the Monsters franchise. KOTM2 especially was a contender for my favorite childhood video-game and I went through multiple phases of being utterly obsessed with it. I've wondered since childhood what a sequel might look like and as an adult have tried many times to plan a KOTM3 project. At one point I had everything I needed to get started- everything but confidence, I suppose!
Naturally, the idea was to pick up where the mysterious bad ending for 2 left off...
The plan was to really go heavy with the three theme, returning to the KOTM2 SNES approach where only Guy, Geon, and Woo are playable characters in story mode. The tradeoff is there would now be three types of power-points could be collected to temporarily morph each monster into one of three new super forms (speed, power, and armor). The campaign would have three branching paths with three alien armies and three heirs to the Famardy family throne: a tryhard pyrokinetic edgelord, a pampered dandy with a levitating throne and robot minions, and an airhead with reality-bending powers.
I was even thinking of doing an intro animation with pixelated characters and Banjo Kazooie style gibberish speech- I was gonna see if TyrantisTerror and Scatha-the-Worm wanted to voice the aliens.
*Beast Wrestler: Old World Federation - After KOTM3 fell through for the zillionth time I thought about trying a different angle: what if I planned out a fan sequel to game that actually needs a remake? Something barely anyone remembers or has heard of, something that nobody even liked?
Beast Wrestler was a Japanese game about genetically engineered tournament fighters that came out in 1991. I didn't grow up with it, I don't own it, and I've only played a little bit of it on a PC emulator. I won't mince words here: it wasn't fun. Fun was not this game's strongsuit, no. It's clunky, uninuitive, awkward, and slow. If I had to grade it purely on how it plays I'd have to give it an F, no question. Trying to get through one match, let alone a playthrough, of Beast Wrestler is just a miserable slog. It doesn't help that it's also kind of ugly to look at, with some pretty awkward walking animations and an aesthetic I can only describe as uh... musty?
It has other strengths, though. There's a surprisingly in-depth hybridization mechanic where you can customize your fighter by suffusing them with the genes of their enemies. It's also got a lot of really weird monsters. Things like Ulvolos, a 45 foot long rattlesnake with a humanoid robot for a top half. Micara, a scaly, tusked, humanoid griffin(?) with voodoo skeleton paint, angel wings, and a snake for a tail. Ploguraz, an obese gray and purple dragon with a ponytail who spins around like a ballerina. Federico, a seemingly pretty normal looking lizard-creature who has jet boosters hidden under his scales and a laser gun for a tail. Airhoyle is some kind of an undead imp/mothman thing that spreads his legs and lashes out with his... umm, tail, I'm hoping?
The game's also got a pretty memorable mood to it, or at least it's intro does. Players are greeted by an old-timey projector slideshow of all the tournament's past winners (ie, the roster of playable characters) and it's weirdly... foreboding? Like you'd think it would be a big hype-up moment, something flashy and celebratory, but it's not. It's very slow and lingering with this creeping, ominous music that tells you "bad things are about to happen". Then the camera pans down from a starry night sky to show the game's logo: dilapidated, unreadable, and in ruins. A wave transition then reveals the original- the splendor of some other time, perhaps long past- and something that sounds suspiciously like the overture from Phantom of the Opera plays. It's all very spooky and theatrical!
From what I've seen, though, the game doesn't actually delve into its setting and lore much, so I thought it'd be fun to dream up a reimagining of it that did! My general idea was to focus mostly on the past, showing things like the origins of the tournament, the relationship between the world's humans and monsters, and the series of events (genetic tampering? corruption?) that lead to its downfall. It was a tempting idea that got me down the Beast Wrestler rabbit hole for a while, but ultimately I decided it just didn't feel right to put so much energy into a personal take on something that I know so little about; the game's not especially well translated and I am, admittedly, pretty in the dark on the subject of BW's development history and what its story was supposed to be like.
Fun fact, though: that cover up there was created by Yasushi Nirasawa, the concept artist behind the Godzilla Final Wars Gigan design and several Kamen Rider baddies!
*Misc. Dino Fighters - I've basically been trying to think up a worthy spiritual successor to Primal Rage since I knew what Primal Rage was... and can you blame me?! Fighting games are awesome and there's a zillion of them to choose from, but how many of them focus on anything other than humans? Sure, every once in a while you get a Darkstalkers or a Killer Instinct, but for every unorthodox outing like that that you've got ten other games about busty babes in skin-tight latex launching kicks at muscular white dudes in gis, usually anime-influenced and or produced in Japan, and there's nothing wrong with any that, but I like my oddballs! Give me any Soul Calibur and a controller and my first instinct will be to check if Lizardman's on the roster.
I've lost track of how many times I drew up characters in college-ruled notebooks with crayons. I tried to get more serious about the idea in highschool and came up with some pitches that were honestly probably more embarrassing than what I dreamt up as a kid (Monsta Rex, Legend of the Orb, Bloodsport), although admittedly cringe is definitely a hindsight thing and I was all in on these dumb ideas at the time. LotO was probably the zenith of them- the one I liked most and was most serious about, the one I made the most art for, and the one that was absolutely objectively the worst of them all. It was basically an angstier, sexless Soul Calibur with talking dinosaurs and shades of alternative/emo punk-rock and Lord of the Rings plagiarism. Truly, a product of its times.
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| CRAAAAAAAWLING IN MY SKIIIIIN, MY OC DOOO NOOOT STEAAAAAAL~ |
*Monster Island Massacre - Waaaaay more recently I toyed around with the idea of killing two birds with one stone and combining my love of kaiju eiga with my desire to make a Primal Rage alternative. It was going to be set in some vague, unspecified antiquity and feature smaller, more primitive forms of famous giant monsters. The roster would be made up mostly of more naturalistic kaiju like Gaira, Zilla, Ebirah, and Kamoebas, as well as a not-yet mutated Godzilla and a host of thematically appropriate non-Toho monsters like King Kong, Gwangi, Gorgo, and Reptilicus. The plan was to go for a dark, grungy PS1-era look with bloody Mortal Kombat type fatalities. The final boss and catalyst for the campaign was going to be Bagan, presented there as an ageless, eldritch time dragon who locks the player into an arena of suspended time while the Earth rapidly ages and transforms outside.
*Primal Rage: New Urth - After that I came back to Primal Rage itself, which believe it or not is actually something I'm usually reluctant to consider. That game was such a curveball, such a weird little oddity with such a specific look and vibe and history that it's hard to recreate. Like lightning in a bottle, but more weird than successful. I have a lot of conflicting feelings about how I'd like to see the series revisited and don't tend to linger on the thought for very long- I guess it's just easier and more appealing to make something like it that feels more my own.
Here are my most recent musings on the subjects regardless:
*Misc. Kaiju Fighters -Naturally the "dinosaur fighting game" thing had to cross over into kaiju territory sometime. I'd already spent so much time thinking about how I'd handle King of the Monsters and War of the Monsters, so why not come up with my own concept in the genre? I'm lumping these all together in one category because I've tried doing this a lot.
I have a lot of half-baked monster ideas, concepts, and prompts jumbled together for this purpose. Most of them are kind of aimless or only half thought out because I wasn't sure yet what I wanted the identity of my kaiju fighter to be- I knew I wanted to do something that felt fresh and new, but I wasn't sure how.
After a few fruitless passes that were mostly focused on character designs I tried switching over to thinking about themes, gimmicks, and aesthetics. There was less concept art to show for it, but I went through a loooot of ideas. Kinda just threw everything at the wall.
One idea was to use geologic time periods, with each fighter being an embodiment of a time in Earth's past: a fiery inorganic golem for the planet's birth, a bizarre and lovecraftian aqua-creature for the Cambrian, a walking extinction event for the Permian, etc.
Another was to make monstrous embodiments of western astrology symbols or tarot cards- perhaps mixing them with some other theme to ensure a unique result: one version used tarot sea creatures. At one point I considered basing the monsters off different phobias. Another plan was to make them genres, with a black and white noir kaiju and a medieval high fantasy kaiju and so on.
Circa 2018 the big frontrunner was underwater kaiju, because I've always been fascinated by aquatic settings and resentful of how much of a bad rap water levels have with modern gamers. Yes, it's for good reason- but it doesn't have to be! I went all-in on trying to figure out how to make movement as fluid and variable in water as it is on land and came up with a three class system where every fighter could be described as either a Cruiser, Crawler, or Creeper; Cruisers would be free-swimming creatures like sharks and squids that would basically handle the same way flying characters do, Crawlers would be things like humanoids and crustaceans that ran around and jumped on the seafloor and had added verticality because of the decreased gravity, and Creepers would function similarly but have an emphasis on stealth and three-dimensional movement with the ability to climb straight up walls, upsidedown on ceilings, and through tight passageways too narrow for other characters.
One other idea I was interested in was an alien bloodsport spin on the common fighting tournament trope, with an underground intergalactic TV network funding an illegal event every so many years where planets volunteer their most hated and destructive kaiju criminals to be shipped off, fighting to the death in a universe-wide pay per view event. Participating planets mostly benefit from the event because odds are they'll never see their biggest problem children again, but the catch is the winner gets to go free and can choose any of the participating planets as their new stomping ground. A variation on the idea made it a team sport with each planet being represented by a pair of criminal kaiju who can tag in and out of each match.
An alternate version of that plan was to keep the tournament strictly Earth-bound but make it a more upstanding event, like the giant monster Olympics; each nation would have its own legally sponsored monster who would fight to bring honor and medals to its homeland. I also toyed around with the idea of pixelizing it all so it'd have a late 80s - early 90s retro feel.
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| Toatara: New Zealand's fire-spitting Maori middle finger to the meteor. Does a mean haka. |
Another idea I was fond of was making the monsters anarchists, with an overtly punk-rock, urban aesthetic with lots of graffiti and pollution, inspired partly by Gorillaz. The focus would have been on city destruction instead of kaiju combat, with each monster's tragic origins giving it a specific vendetta against "the man"- capitalism and mega-corporations, colonizers, corrupt governments, systemic oppression, etc. That version would've ranked and rewarded players based on how much property damage they accrued, how badly they were wanted by the world government, and how much of a cult following they'd garnered with the lower class... each monster would've had its own "groupies": activists, protestors, and disgruntled average joes who showed up to all its rampages to cheer it on.
*Rampage: Eat the Rich! - Midway's Rampage has been hovering around in the back of my mind for years. It's another giant monster video game, so why not give it the WOTM2/KOTM3 treatment too? I flirt semi-seriously with the idea once every blue moon and was at one point surprised to see that, according to a community poll I'd posted, Rampage content was actually what my DeviantArt following most wanted to see from me... but I'd never really tried to make a go at it.
The problem is I'm just not a huge Rampage fan. I've always had a weird relationship with that franchise, liking it but not loving it, enjoying the games in arcades and as rentals but never feeling invested enough to buy any of them. The tone and character designs have never totally gelled with me, like they're almost my kind of thing, but not really? Which of course makes me extremely nervous about having anything to do with it. Like, am I just not getting something? Is there some context I don't know about that would make be feel differently, or is this just a simple matter of personal taste? Is someone like myself even capable of making a respectful Rampage tribute or would I be doomed to make the no-budget Z grade version of something like Godzilla 98 or Dragonball Evolution?!
Beats me, dawg.
All I know is I had one idea on how to do it, to adapt that last concept of "kaiju as an outlet against the system" into a fan reboot of Rampage. It'd basically be the same premise as Rampage: Total Destruction, with random everyday people being turned into monsters by some irresponsible new Scumlabs product, but I'd try to give it more of a story focus. The mutated humans wouldn't be destroying everything in sight wily nily like usual, they'd be out for revenge against Scumlabs specifically, as well as their allies and the wealthy elites who fund them. The monsters would only be destroying ritzy neighborhoods and mansions this time, mega-yachts and private islands, industrial complexes, government buildings. There'd be a big emphasis on making every level as gaudy and over-indulgent as possible and a rogues gallery of boss characters could be designed around unscrupulous billionaires (can you say "cybermech"?).
The monsters would be BIG advocates for the little guy- not just unfortunate victims of exploitation, but disgruntled employees, rebels, and rioters who's oppressors have just inadvertently gave them the ultimate power to rise up. The game would be all about blowing off steam: destroying stuff not because "that's what giant monsters do" but because it's cathartic! Because it's fun! Because you need this! Because enough is enough, dammit!
Maybe more controversially I had two other changes in mind. One is that I'd steer the monster designs toward more original creations; buff humanoid animals with vaguely Street Sharks esque proportions have always been Rampage's calling card and I wouldn't change that, exactly, but at the same time I'd be lying if I said I'd want to embrace it. There are a lot of tertiary Rampage monsters that honestly just strike me as being lazy and formulaic. The ones I remember first and most fondly are always the ones that either take liberties with their basis like Ralph, Squirmy, Amanda and Bart, or the ones that aren't based on specific animals at all like Myukus, Nick, Philbert, Eyegore, and Bubba, and so on. I think it'd also be more interesting to take psyche into account when designing them, making the "Rampagers" more like physical expressions of their inner beasts. Things like an accountant who dreamt of being a painter turning into something super bright and flamboyant, or an under-appreciated chef getting knives for hands and the power to perfectly barbecue anything she wants.
The other change I was thinking about was giving each monster a second form: a smaller, more humanoid "intermediate" form to start each level as... sort of like the more extreme examples of X-Men mutants, I guess? They'd be human in size and shape, but only size and shape. Lizzie might be recognizable as a woman to begin with but have scaly green skin, quills, and a forked tongue. Ralph could be more like a blue wolfman. They'd have roughly the same attributes and powers but would need to build meter somehow before transforming- maybe by destroying enough things or collecting mutagenic power-ups? The idea is it would put more emphasis on the idea that all of these monsters are also people, and that it would add a new twist to the game: running around in offices and streets at human scale, bashing in cars and jumping through windows, trashing rooms full of fragile valuables, shrugging off gunfire and tasers and then, at juuuust the right moment, unlocking your potential and obliterating everything around you just by growing to full size.
*Monster Hunter Legends - This should be a short one; I don't have any art, in-depth plans, or even enough info to fill a word doc... but for a pretty long time I was hell-bent on doing a Monster Hunter 3 fan comic. Specifically I wanted to retell the tale of my own online experiences with the game, blending real life events and memorable hunts to make a dramatized cohesive plot. Monster Hunter 3 is a deeply personal game to me and I have a lot of good memories of the people I met there and the time I spent with them. I thought it would be a fun personal challenge to take on and something a little different from the games, which don't usually give you a chance to see the human side of hunters. I gave it a couple goes but nothing ever went well enough to save, even as a WIP; I'm only just learning to draw passable people and crude simple backgrounds now, so back then it was waaaay too much for me.
If you're looking for a real Monster Hunter fan-comic then I highly recommend Inkoseh's!
*Project Bermuda - I did some loose thumbnail sketches for a community poll on this one, but mostly this project existed as a word document- a document that I now see is no longer in my files. Probably on my older laptop though- maybe I'll dig it up some time. It was another game pitch idea that I workshopped from roughly 2016 - 2018.
The idea was to do an underwater third person shooter with a heavy focus on exploration and vehicles. Players would free dive and use scuba jets, deep sea submersibles, and various kinds of boats to brave the perils of the legendary Bermuda Triangle, here a mysterious spacetime anomaly where the lines between past, present, and future blur. Taking on the role of an agent in a top secret government agency tasked with protecting the public from paranormal threats, the player is tasked with a World's Most Wanted list of legendary sea monsters: dangerous freaks of nature that roam the seas sinking ships and swallowing sailors, slipping in and out of wormholes to evade detection. To catch them the player will have to do the same, following clues like eye witness accounts, whale kills, and outbreaks of out-of-place or anachronistic wildlife to figure out which sea monster is causing trouble and which version of its ocean it's hiding out in.
I also liked the idea of there being an option to either kill or capture each creature, with a giant undersea base featuring an aquarium/jail and museum/morgue where you could study targets alive or dead. Depending on which path you favored (or which particular monsters you killed or captured) there could be different finales- perhaps sparing too many unstable targets leads to a mass breakout event, or killing too many monsters incites the wrath of some ancient sea god?
*Dino Horror V1 - In the 2010s I played around with the idea of doing some kind of dinosaur-themed horror project. IIRC it was spurred on by a particularly bloody and upsetting nightmare where I got eaten in a laboratory. Anyway, there were two main versions of it that I messed around with before dropping it in favor of a DHD revival.
The first idea was to have a modern setting where some lab-grown variant of the bird flu virus starts mutating wildlife. I don't remember the specifics of why the virus was created or how it did any of what it did (I do remember thinking about it, but dang if I don't remember a thing), but the general gist of it was the virus only affected archosaurs and thus spread throughout the food web largely unnoticed; by the time people started finding baby cardinals with hands and saw-toothed bluejays it would already be too late.
The "dinosaurs" of the setting would thus all be fictional mutations, creatures born from normal birds and crocodilians that'd contracted the virus and unwittingly passed it on, allowing it to modify the genes of their gestating offspring. Basically Jack Horner's emu-a-saurus idea but on a global scale and as an uncontrollable pandemic.
*Dino Horror V2 - I guess "Carnosaur with killer robins" wasn't quite silly enough so after that I focused on an ever weirder premise: tail dragging, cold blooded, hivemind sharing retrosaurs from another dimension besieging 1800s America.
Felt too derivative, I guess... that and for some reason I thought nobody'd take it seriously!
*ID: The Inner Dimension - Okay, TECHNICALLY this one didn't get scrapped, it just flopped!
For whatever random reason in the summer of 2017 I got this idea to do a project about dreams. The basic idea was that every person in real life had an inhuman persona that they unconsciously projected into other planes of reality while sleeping, a whole "other self" with a life of their own, and neither party knew of the other. These dream-selves could be virtually anything, with extreme supernatural attributes that could be strengthened or altered depending on where they went. The dreamscape they inhabited had endless worlds in it, all real in their own right with their own set of rules but strictly separate from physical reality.
It was doomed to fail from the start, something I wish I had seen before trying to hype people up for it.
Basically I was feeling frustrated by the constraints of other projects and wanted to work on something totally free form, where the genre and setting and scale could all change on a dime and I wouldn't feel cramped in a little box of my own making. Instead I learned a very valuable lesson that I still hold onto today: there is such a thing as too much freedom. Constraints can be frustrating, but also helpful, challenging, guiding. When I took all that away I got listless and overwhelmed. There was no consistency, no identity. I had way too many options and not enough reasons to care about them.
It was worth trying just for the lesson learned but barely held my attention for a month.
*"GOOM" - In Mexico City an archaeologist and struggling single parent volunteers to be the chaperone for his son's field trip to the local museum in an attempt to reconnect. His son, an autistic shut-in who's obsessed with ancient civilizations, desperately wants to know more about his father's work but is growing increasingly frustrated and resentful because he can't- not until his father's work is officially published. During the field trip a botched attempt at standing up to bullies sends the boy fleeing the tour group, leading him to become lost in a restricted wing of the museum. Fascinated by what he finds, he pries into corners better left unchecked and places his bare hands on an ancient stone tablet... something inside him awakens a secret power hidden inside, opening a portal straight to Hell. A multitude of real, human-hating, bloodthirsty, flesh-eating demons spill out, chasing the boy back to the main hall while setting fire to the building and breaking out into the streets. Total pandemonium breaks loose, with fireball chucking scamps setting fire to the city, ram-horned brutes battling police, and winged gargoyles downing news helicopters. Just when it seems things can't possibly get worse the earth begins to shake and the whole street is splits in two. Running outside, the father and son duo make it out of the collapsing museum just in time to see an enormous armored shell rise up from the ground.
Crawling out from his ancient resting place beneath the city, Gamera emerges to challenge the legions of Hell. The giant fire-eating turtle has the power to absorb the evil energies of the netherworld, feasting on Hellfire and using its power to strengthen his own, making him uniquely- perhaps even deliberately- well suited to thwarting the horde.
The young boy watches in awe as the monolithic monster disperses the swarm single-handedly, shuts the portal, and turns to look him directly in the eye.
Cue one colossal kaiju-scale adventure across Latin America, complete with satanic cults, luchadores, the lost city of Atlantis, and the Friend of All Children going straight to Hell to kick evil's ass.
*Cursed Breeds - To close things out I'll bring up something that's less of a canned project and more of a "break glass in case of emergency" type thing. A "mons game" concept!
I don't play a lot (or really any) monster collecting/battling games these days, but I grew up with Digimon, Pokémon, and Monster Rancher. It's a genre I have fond memories of and wouldn't mind taking a swing at some time, especially if I ever made a more serious attempt at getting into making games. A really simple mon-clone might be a good ""starting"" game to build after passing the obligatory "learn how to code","make the ball roll from one side of the screen to the other" type stuff. Something I'd enjoy working on but wouldn't get totally obsessed with, because hey, there are a million other games like this to choose from, no pressure!
There's really only two things I'd want to accomplish in a project like this. Number one is to make it more like Monster Rancher than Pokémon, partly because Pokémon and things trying to be Pokémon are absolutely everywhere, but more importantly because I personally prefer the Monster Rancher format! The cozy farm life setting, being able to do things with the monsters besides fighting, and being able to combine monsters to create variable unique results. Last time I workshopped this my plan was to have two forms of combination: a relatively easy to predict genetic option where monster genes dictate what hybrid you get, and a more unstable fantasy ritual that can yield weirder results but is more likely to fail. Like in Monster Rancher it wouldn't be as simple as just "white ape + green bug = light green bug-ape" every time. Depending on RNG, individual monster stats, items added, and the combination technique employed you might end up with "hairy white bug" or "green ape" or "ape with bug horn" or "bug with ape strength" and so on. Trying to learn and successfully breed all the combos is half the fun!
Goal number two would be to make at least some attempt to tactfully skirt the moral dilemmas presented by a setting where people create living things just to make them fight each other. The two responses I usually see to this (if there even is a response) is to either cut the combat entirely and make the mons like pets, or go all in on the edge and make a grimdark dystopia where the whole world's awful on purpose. Personally I would rather just go the route of keeping combat and a light-hearted tone but also providing alternative activities. Like, the Monster Rancher games usually have stuff like log-rolling, boulder tossing, and obstacle courses, but as simple minigames for training- why not expand on that idea? I think it could be fun to have multiple paths to explore. You could still train a tournament fighter if you wanted to, of course, but you could also take your beastie out to the racetrack, enter it in a fancy monster-show or a talent competition, maybe even take photos of it and turn it into an online celebrity!
Anyway, as shown above I've done a few passes of simple designs, sketches and doodles, rough ideas- never anything super-duper serious or polished. The goal was to make things that were simple and distinct enough to function as combination components/archetypes, but not so simple that they have no personality or look boring... a test some of the above definitely fail, but hey: the point of this whole post is basically they can't all be winners!
Always interesting to see an artist's cut projects; a friend of mine's recently picked up a new one based around a no-K/Pg scenario incorporating a lot of ideas from some of his scrapped projects over the years. I've been following your stuff for a while, so I can recall at least a few of these things; I thought ID was a pretty neat idea, even if it didn't hold your interest too well. Of these pitched, I think Age of Shadows still sounds like a really solid idea, I'm interested in knowing what the four races your drew up there are. And of course, being the biggest TM fan there is, I'll always be fascinated by the could-have-beens of that idea, but alas. Glad to see you've found somewhere to share some of these ideas, hope to see what you've got in store in future.
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