Do you have WIPs that you've put on indefinite hiatus?Projects you've started and then abandoned or forgotten?Then this is the place for you.
The Bring Out Your Ghosts Jam is a place to show off the ghosts of the game development process. Abandoned or forgotten WIPs. Overly ambitious projects that never got off the ground. Notes and ideas for games that never came to be.
The name and timing of the jam is inspired by the Ghost Festival (or Zhongyuanjie) in East Asian tradition, a time when the ghosts of the deceased are said to visit the living. Imagine being visited by the ghosts of dead WIPs. What would they say?
Inspired by the Bring Out Your Dead Jam, hosted by Emily Short.
Rules
Incomplete and abandoned games, ideas, notes, etc. are all welcome.
Projects updated because of this jam are also okay. If you decide to revisit (or finish!) an old abandoned project because of this jam, that's great!
As with the original Bring Out Your Dead Jam, it would be nice if you include some context in the Author's Notes when submitting. How did your project come about? Why was it abandoned or forgotten? What lessons can be learned from the process? This is optional but encouraged :)
While the creators of this jam come from the interactive fiction community, any games, physical games, text, etc. are allowed.
Games should not include any generated AI content (incl. Cover Image/Game Page). Entries using AI/LLM will be removed.
It's the end of the month again, so it's time for an update on my abandoned projects. Once again, I'm sorry to say that there isn't much progress! This time around, I want to focus solely on my brain hat.
If you remember, my brain hat was a project that I started in 2020. It was a pink ribbed hat with I-cords knit around the sides in squiggles to make it look like a brain. It was meant to be a cute little accessory for Halloween.
Making the hat was the easy part, but I hand-knit each of the icords and quickly ran out of steam. It was the goal to finally purchase an icord maker and finish this in time for Halloween. Well, we are still a few months out, but take a look at where we are now!
I've removed all the icords from the hat. They're a bit squiggly from being sewn down for so long. My first step is actually to make the hat a little bit longer. I plan to use a skin-toned color so that the ribbing matches my skin, and then it looks as though my brain is popping out. Then I'm going to resew the existing icords back on the hat and make any new ones to fill the gaps.
My goal is to have this finished by Halloween! I think it's doable!
I've been thinking a lot about one of my old projects that never really got off the ground and I always wanted to get back to today.
The title was "Chronicles of a Broken Doll" and in the initial premise, it was a comic book, but today I was thinking about how it's episodic nature would translate to a TV show.
The basic premise is this: Sometime in 18cough, a wealthy uncle promises to buy his niblings a present each. The older brother, a teenager, notices a particular china doll that looks uncannily like the girl he's got a crush on, and he pressures his little sister to go with that one. She's cross, but she likes the doll, so she agrees. That night, the big brother sneaks into his sister's room and starts obsessively fawning over the doll, calling her his crush's name. The sister wakes up and startles him, and he drops the doll, who develops a large crack across her face. The girl is very mad at her brother but refuses to get rid of her new doll, naming her Caitlin to differentiate her from her brother's crush.
Once the humans are asleep, the other toys come to life and wonder what will happen to a doll who was broken before she "woke up", which is to say, formed a consciousness through being loved. To everyone's surprise, she immediately "wakes up" and discovers the crack across her face.
A supernatural entity appears in the room, and all the toys other than Caitlin immediately bow to him as Prince of the Dolls. The Prince explains to Caitlin that toys "wake up" by being loved by humans, and while the love of the brother was twisted and aimed at someone else, it was intense enough to speed up the process. The Prince enlists Caitlin to, when she wakes up at night, find humans that would be happier as toys and transform them into toys. He allows her two teammates on this mission, whose names escape me at the moment. But they were a boy pierrot marionette and a stuffed cat who insists their gender is "cat". The cat is kind and sagacious, being the oldest toy in the party, and the marionette is a wisecracking flirt who very slowly learns that this makes Caitlin uncomfortable and manages to start flirting with everyone but her.
The cat instructs her to make sure she keep being played with, because if she stops being loved she will "fall asleep" and become an empty doll again. Also, that she needs to be careful not to be caught moving, as the gaze of a human will turn her back into china. And also, because she's made of china, she needs to be sure that no humans see her when she's moving, because if she returns to being made of china when her hands are in a different position, her fingers will snap off.
When they're not creeping out of the house, finding the saddest people in the world, and turning them into toys, and giving them to random children, the cat regales Caitlin with tales of the tin soldier who now rests in the top of the toy cupboard, who was a plaything of the brother when he was very little, but after he stopped being played with, he "fell asleep" and is essentially dead. Caitlin begins to fall in love with the tin soldier, but worries that since she never actually knew him when he was alive, this love is the same unhealthy one-sided love that brought her to life. There is much pondering about unrequited love and if it makes one a bad person, which given my situation at the time I wrote this makes a lot of sense.
There was a character named the Toymaker, who was some sort of old wizard who did the actual magic that turned people into toys when Caitlin's team reported to him. For some reason, he was the only human who could see dolls move without them breaking. I don't remember what that was going to be.
The only truly villainous character (although, we learn over the course of the stories all the main characters are a bit fucked up) is a woman called "The Doll Collector" who knows that dolls are alive, but keeps them in glass cases anyway. We later learn the Doll Collector is in fact a human-sized doll who is extremely willing to let other dolls suffer because she can't actually join doll society or human society, because she's too big and intricate to become a child's plaything, and because if a human ever actually saw her, instead of talking to her via letters and behind curtains, she would turn back into china. We also learn that she has, somewhat clumsily, jointed her own hands by breaking her own fingers, running a string through them, and covering them with gloves, so before we know her whole deal her hands just seem a little weirdly jointed and it's very unsettling.
I did mention this was a whimsical horror, right?
All this to say, I spent a lot of time today thinking about how these characters would look in the style of edgy adult animation versus how they would look in stop-motion. Hypothetically, this could be done in CGI as well, but I can't think of a CG style that would suit this story as the friendly Pixar style everyone copies these days is so wildly unsuited. If there was a good way to emulate my ink drawing style in animation, that would be perfect.
But in any case, the "the girl falls asleep, the team sneaks out, we meet one of the most miserable people on the planet, the toymaker makes them a toy, the team sneaks back in, a child awakes with a new toy" formula would actually work very well as a series of episodes, and that last point only occurred to me today.
These are some unfinished drawings i did before my old pc broke in 2022. might redo the bottom right one.
top left is T1945, bottom right is T6575, bottom left T15320/a. All from Unimus. The bird could be C61471 but i'm not sure. and the bottom left i just can't find. I don't even have the original files for these anymore :(
