Abandoned Game Design...

[John Michael Crovis]

I am giving up on designing a game based on Super M. Bros. The idea no longer appeals to me. I'm interested in writing something more adult, more relevant, and more interesting. My question is, what do I do with the material I already have? It isn't exactly useless - it could still be a pretty good game if someone is willing to put the effort into it to flesh it out. Do I sit on it until I get the urge to try writing the game again? Do I post what I have on my website on an "Incomplete Ideas" page? What do you do with your abandoned games?

[vulpinoid]

I think virtually everyone here has at least one piece of "abandonware"...

An idea was floated a while back, where a designer would give up their incomplete game to another designer, in exchange for one of theirs...or maybe the design ideas would go into a pool where someone puts something in if they agree to finish something that's already in the pool.

Most people just leave their designs half-complete on a website somewhere, gathering dust.

[Onix]

I posted an incomplete game over at rpg lab. Actually it is mostly complete I'm just not going to do anything with it.

[J.K.Mosher]

If it's almost finished I'd post it.
Get some feedback, and if the feedback sparks
an idea work on it somemore. Or maybe it'll give someone else an idea
and they'll be able to add to it.

[John Michael Crovis]

It's no where near finished... and I think part of the reason why I lost interest is because it's based off of copyrighted material. While I think the game would have been well within the confines of copyright law, under fair-use, it still made me a bit uncomfortable. I think I'll just leave the game to rot on my hard drive until I get a better idea of what to do with it.

[J.K.Mosher]

I would agree then to letting it rot.
If your not comfortable with it, for whatever reason (and you have a good one)
it should not see the light of day, at least for now.

It sounded like an interesting concept, so I do hope at some point
you get a chance to return to it.

[Rob Lang]

It's ok to let ideas go. I don't think of it as rot, I think of it as letting them be free. You've already shared in on the forum, someone might pick it up in the future and run with it. Perhaps not.

[John Michael Crovis]

[Rob Lang]

It's in the list, sir! Family stuff has been exhausting me recently, I'm afraid!

[NewBigDragon]

When I have things like this, I go by the adage, "Let it go... if it's meant to come back to you, it will." You never know what will happen. The RPG I posted here recently in the Free RPGs section was something I wrote in high school in the mid 1980s. I discovered a paper copy about a year ago when I was going through some things in the garage. I OCR'd it, slapped in some graphics to give it a retro appeal, and there it is. It's had a 1000 downloads from MediaFire through other links, plus however many downloads it might have earned here. It's just nice to know it wasn't a complete waste.