Some more ideas that are much more blobby and malleable:

I WONDER WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE BATMAN is another idea that was born in the writing of one of my then-Kindergarten students (the same one that inspired Super Chicken, actually). Original text:

“I wonder what it’s like to be Batman?

Would I fight bad guys?

Would I throw the Batarang?”

It’s basically a forced-scrolling run & gun where you run and jump along the rooftops of Gotham and collect toasted peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and bonk criminals with the Batarang. If you bonk enough criminals, Batman feels so great about being Batman that he goes surfing, and you avoid Reminders That His Parents Are Dead. I’ve done a quick prototype of the rooftop generation, and I’m still pretty excited about this because WHO DOESN’T LOVE SILLY BATMAN no one.

This is the only idea in this list that has a Next Step because I haven’t prototyped anything else.

I can’t seem to let go of my desire to do a dungeon-crawler of some kind, so here we are with “VERSNOOF”. The name is onomatopoetic and indicates the sound I wanted the main monster to have when I first had the idea. It is an astoundingly stupid name that refuses to be disassociated.

I started a prototype when I was first learning to program, but it was beyond my skills at the time. Planned:

- Procedural caves, full of squishy fungus

- One-way progression and FATE FEELINGS

- A ritually-blinded protagonist who senses monsters with a kind of psychic echolocation

- Gradual collection of a single item that is needed to defeat the main monster, who may appear at any time ALA Sinistar

So, kind of Sound Voyager meets Hunt the Wumpus meets Sinistar. The game will end when you die, before or after killing Versnoof. Arcade fun!

Cloud Cats is the first game I ever tried to make and I’ve rolled up and discarded quite a few prototypes. I still like a lot of the art I’ve made for it and I need to just Make This Game. It will basically just be a shmup with a lot of fun enemy types, and you will select the form of the final boss by shooting (WITH HEARTS) the enemies you like the most. Kind of a choose your own path one-level shmup?

Originally,  I started working on this to accompany some songs Tif and I recorded as Elephant Kiss?. I’ve also thought about doing a pseudo-3D Rez-y type of game like PUNCH THE BUTTS 3D. The first version had some story boxes and a lot of first-time-making-a-game junk tacked on (plus some awful sprite scaling).

I love old NES shooters like Lifeforce, Abadox, Air Fortress, and Xanac, and things like R-Type and Thrustburst and AHHGHGH I love them all. One of my old notebooks is totally full of drawings and planned weapons and features and ridiculously named bosses (“SENATOR GRABBYPAWS THEODORE THE ELDER”) for a game I called ROBOT GERMS and I think it could still be really cute and fun to take some of those things and make a concise spaceship game inside someone’s guts. If I ever do this one, I want to just scan drawings in and make it that way.