Post your abandoned PowerPoint games here!

If you have any PowerPoint games you've worked on but is unfinished, abandoned, or something you wouldn't dare dedicating a topic to, now is your opportunity to share what didn't make it. Whether or not you have a download is completely fine. Who knows, you may find a whole new perspective while you and other forum members reflect on your glorious past.

Without further ado, here are some of my abandoned PowerPoint games.

• Cursor Adventure
  

Year made: 2012
A mysterious red gem has been stolen at the local museum, and it's up to you, Curso the Cursor, to take on the quest to retrieve the gem back.

Every PowerPoint game creator must have had to create a mouse maze game at some point, and Cursor Adventure was my attempt at the popular genre. What set this game apart from the others was its ability to interact with the surrounding environment. Rather than overlaying levels to a background, Cursor Adventure levels may involve dodging cars and boulders through towns and mountains.

Cursor Adventure was supposed to feature a tutorial and six worlds, but I only finished the first world before calling it quits. Coming up with levels became increasingly difficult, and I didn't feel like it was worth the effort to finish the game.

Legacy: Cursor Adventure's level graphics were reused with my worst mouse maze levels ever.

Download

Edit password: L2AH3C691X

• PowerPoint Arcade
  

Year made: 2012
The PowerPoint Arcade is a minigame compilation I have made.


This was my attempt at bundling arcade-styled PowerPoint games into one ultimate package. The five games included in this release include:

 - The Mouse Maze Challenge - a fast-paced mouse labyrinth. Easy mode only
 - Reaction - click the button before it's too late. Demo version
 - Memoric Trivia - answer all the trivia questions while remembering the given passcode. Easy/medium only
 - Wheel of Randomness - a ripoff of the wheel mechanism from Wheel of Fortune for PowerPoint
 - What's my Number? - a ripoff of the below masochistic game

This game contains music from Newgrounds. Every composer was credited in the About slide.

In case it isn't clear enough, I discontinued PowerPoint Arcade because it was too difficult and increasingly mundane to come up with good games. Looking back, only one of the games here was legitimately good. Two others were all right, and the remaining two were evidence I was out of ideas.

Download

• I am Thinking of a Number Between 1 and 1,000
  

Year made: 2010 (minor revision in 2012)
Now guess my number.


For some random reason, I thought it'd be funny to mess around with people, "forcing" them to guess from 1,000 numbers. Believe it or not, I typed to 1 -1,000 by hand. I also went through 999 of the numbers, individually hyperlinking them to the dreaded "WRONG!" slide.

Legacy: I eventually remade this game for the Web, advertising its newfound ability to randomly choose the correct number. If you look at the source code of the original release, you can tell I spent a LOT of time at this.

After learning about the for loop, I realized the error of my ways and promptly reduced the game's file size by at least 80%. Renamed to I am Thinking of a Number, I added a multitude of features like the ability to guess from any number range, forming the respectable number guesser it is today.

Download

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I have other abandoned projects I might reveal later, some of which are not on my Website. Now let's hear about yours, if you're willing to share.

Orbytz

I think I bit of a lot more than I can chew with this project. 

Gameplay:
Gameplay was supposed to be similar to the Playstation game of Katamari Damacy, where you are rolling a ball collecting items that are smaller than your ball to make your ball grow larger, so you can roll up bigger things.

Why this is abandoned:
Early on during development I have realized that I won't be able to replicate the fast and fun energy and non-linear play that Katamari has. Because of this, I have abandoned this project. This would be an interesting concept if done right, and I hope that someone can draw some inspiration from this concept.

What's inside:
There is an animated intro with a mini-game before the game would actually start. After that, is the beginning of a game layout, and the proposed path that would have been if I did continue onward with the game.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1327tWrj9c37oko5K6VirCTlPfJ8ZThF_

I had a look at Orbytz and game map with all the arrows. I can definitely see why you bit more than you could chew; it's incredibly difficult to create a non-linear PowerPoint game without macros.

It seemed like a good idea at the time but I think I may have just stopped myself producing the most boring game ever made on PowerPoint. It was called Fossil Hunter.

Fossil hunters (paleontologists) work with excruciating patience to clear away the rock and debris around fossilised dinosaurs etc. This game replicates this painstaking activity.

You search around a landscape for signs of some fossilised bones. On finding something you chip away, and chip away a little more, and a little more etc etc etc until a whole fossil dinosaur is revealed. When you have revealed the last bone, the name of the dinosaur and a picture of it is revealed.

This game uses the wonderful 'background picture fill' technique with hexagons that disappear 'on click' (self triggerd). There's a corresponding 'background fill' rectangle for every hexagon that also disappears until the last one's removal reveals the picture and name.

Exciting stuff huh?! No? OK, I think I agree.

You can download the first fossil here:  FOSSIL 1


Here are some screenshots of an initial find, a partially chipped-away fossil, and some pre-buried fossils.





 

Come to think of it, maybe there's some potential as a educational game if adapted quite a bit. Ideas welcome - especially if it's something you want to pick up and run with - let me know.

johnr, do you see yourself as a patient person? After trying FOSSIL HUNTER, seeing all the triggers, and remembering your other projects that have even more triggers, is this a part of PowerPoint development you like doing? If so, what makes it enjoyable? If not, what keeps you motivated?

I would say that I'm a pretty patient person but....as far as making hundreds of triggers is concerned I use a lot of copy/paste to help. I also try to get into a rhythum of doing the repeated stuff, which can be somewhat therapeutic - until it gets iterrupted!

Tim.. Just curious (as i'm on my phone do i cant check...mnemonic trivia... How far did you get. I'm thinking if it works like The Exit List ... I might want to look that one over for another game show)

ListWits wrote:Tim.. Just curious (as i'm on my phone do i cant check...mnemonic trivia...    How far did you get.   I'm thinking if it works like The Exit List ... I might want to look that one over for another game show)

Just had a look at The Exit List. The premise is similar, but that's about as far as it gets. Also, Memoric Trivia uses no VBA, which you'll need for The Exit List.

You can still try Memoric Trivia to see if you get any ideas. The PowerPoint Arcade file includes three rounds.

I've got an idea for it, Tim..I have to figure out how to implement it so it's graphically appealing without losing any of the hard trivia/code hardness..

College Of Dupage — The Video Game:

This was a harmlessly-satirical take on life at the college I would have attended after high-school had I actually been interested in that path.  The game was actually completed, but there was more added to it later.  That being said, it's defs no-longer supported!

Original Release Year:
2008 (It was my second game ever made!)

Issues:
• Low-Fidelity, Four-Bit, Game-Boy-Advance-Level Audio (I didn't have a real record label back then),
• Awful graphics!  (Some of them were drawn by my sister, because I couldn't see well-enough to visualise them myself),
• The worst text-to-speech engine on the planet for in-game-accessibility!  (Let's not even go there!)

Pluses:
• A fully-voice-acted story-mode.
• Tons of hilariously-hideous mini-games!
• A short animated-film made entirely in PowerPoint!
• Two episodes of my old web-show that never took-off, "iFreddie", a rip-off of Nickelodeon's iCarly.
• An in-game store where you can collect text-books (although, sadly, I never actually wrote them for you to read).
• Rumploads of selectable professors with utterly-laughable names!
• The ability to pawn-off your past professors!
• The only time you'll witness flying-textbooks based on real ones in a video-game!
• A horribly-visually-formated radio-show parodising The [obscure] Steve Harvey Morning Show on WGCI in Chicago.
• The world's worst flight-simulator — sorta!  (You can't even tell it's an airplane, except, MAYBE, during the cockpit-scene!)
• A tiiiiiiiiiiiiny bit, of actually-educational-content!
• Improv that'll make you laugh so hard, you might relieve yourself in your knickers!
• Sheerly funny noises performed by the voice-acting staff that you never knew humans could make!
• A shockingly-accurate representation of a QWERTY keyboard, made out of only PowerPoint-shapes, whose enter key is the only one that actually visually does anything!
• My first attempt at a PoKéMoN Battle simulator (but it sucked butt)!
• Ever-so-basic, but nevertheless, full Kiosk-Mode optimisations for the present-day builds of PowerPoint, believe it or not!
• And seemingly many other adventures to be had and discoveries to be made — there've got to be at least three hours of content in this thing!

Download link:
https://gamejolt.com/games/CollegeOfDupage/440772

Please enjoy, and as always, "Happy Jading!"

Balloon in Labyrinths

Spanish/original title is "Globo En Dédalos". This game was going to be Estudios Kotsbek' first release, it would have released in early May 2022. The game was pretty basic: Everything would depend from hyperlinks (At that time we weren't very aware of animation and trigger techniques to create PowerPoint games) and it was about a red balloon character who happens to be in a singular, large maze.
As a matter of context for the character, the red balloon is a joke character that originated years ago when a classmate painted a face in one of several red balloons inflated and used for an activity.

The player would have to use arrow-shaped buttons to move the character from tile to tile, with about 25 tiles of the maze being shown on screen (It worked a bit like Minecraft's chunks). Enemies and untouchable objects were planned to be added, I wasn't sure how enemies would work with this kind of game but it was more of a stay-out-of-their-sight-line situation to avoid them.

Shown in this post are pictures of the game's assets that feature the following things:

• The red balloon, the game's protagonist.
  
• Tiles for the maze that show the aforementioned maze's three different sections: The grassy zone, the sandy zone and the fiery zone.
  
• 3 enemies, 1 for each zone. The grassy zone's enemy was a blue balloon that is noticeably an evil counterpart of the protagonist, the sandy zone's enemy was a snake and the fiery zone's enemy was a small, green dragon.
  
• Minor characters: Flags that serve as indicators for the maze's start and end. I think the blue flag was meant to indicate the start of the maze while the purple flag would be at the end of the maze.
  
• 3 hazards, 1 for each zone. The grassy zone's obstacles were roses, the sandy zone's obstacles were cacti and the fiery zone's obstacles were lava patches. You can tell by the first two obstacles that we were thinking of sharp objects or anything that could damage a balloon for hazards.
  
• Colors are taken from PICO-8's color pallettes.
  

The game was scrapped by April 28, 2022. The PowerPoint file for the game only has the main menu and part of the help section, with the file last modified on April 25, 2022. The art style for the game went through 2-3 changes and changes to gameplay and its concepts were done once or twice, I remained very undecisive with these aspects until settling with the final style and gameplay, despite never finishing the game.
The reason the game was scrapped was because we started to learn more of uses of animations and triggers that help even more in PowerPoint game development, thus making us feel less convinced of the game and its concept.
After scrapping the game, we took the idea of a frog character for a PowerPoint game and the first game we released was Toxic Pest (Plaga Ponzoña) in May 6, 2022.

Even though this game concept was scrapped entirely, we might use the red balloon boy in a future PowerPoint game, so don't worry yet about this character and/or his likeliness not seeing the light of day. As for now, have a good day, afternoon or night!