You've probably seen the game Trickshot on this website but did you know there was another version in the works set in a forest and featuring a spiky helmeted protagonist? Let me present to you Super Trickshot and why you will never be able to play it.
The idea began as a Crazy Golf style game. You play as a rotund spiky guy who's job is to collide with as many enemies as possible on their way to the goal. Here's a gif of the little guy straight after he'd been modelled. It's like his baby photo!
Each enemy had their own unique behaviours and you needed to defeat them all before the way to the goal was unlocked. Some could evade the player and others needed to be attacked multiple times. Here's the line up and a breakdown of what they could do!
Mushroom - Rhythmically pops it's head in and above ground to avoid being hit. But it sent flying if can time it right!
Acorn - Patrols around the map. Shatters into pieces on hit.
Dew Drop - Divides into smaller enemies on initial hit.
Bush - They stand on top each other to avoid being hit, bounce back and forth between two barriers to get them all in one shot.
Apple - On hit they are sent rolling across the map before shattering on impact with a barrier. Aim the shot well to send them into another enemy!
The failure state came from the limited number of shots you had before game over, forcing you to take out as many enemies as you could in a single turn. The player achieved this by lining up their shot to collide with as many enemies as possible, bouncing off of obstacles to redirect themselves into the next one. I added a trajectory line to help players achieve this and let me tell you, that turned into way more of a headache than you'd expect.
Turns out there's no straight forward way to predict what will happen with Unity's physics engine. Running a simulation in the background was too slow, and using a formula relied on variables that would only be defined mid flight. So I worked in reverse, I had the player character follow along the trajectory line like a train on tracks, rather than try to guess where it would go before it did. This came with it's own list of problems to solve, but that's for another day. Let me tell you why no one will ever get to play this crazy game.
It was a couple of months after development and I was just wrapping things up when a game called Baldur's Gate 3 had released. Needless to say that delayed the release of Super Trickshot quite a bit! Well turn's out my Nvidia GTX 970 wasn't gonna cut it for this thing and so I upgraded to a shiny RTX 4060. But in order to get the most out the card I was going to need to update my motherboard's firmware. Sure, I thought, can't be that difficult!
Well, imagine my surprise when I reboot my PC to find the drive with every Unity project I made in the last 10 years is completely absent from Windows Explorer. And not one piece of software will recognise it. Trust me, I tried them all!
And so the journey of our circular spike ball was over before it began. He will have to remain forever a gif on this post instead. If it's any consolation, the spirit of Super Trickshot lived on in Trickshot, which swaps out the Crazy Golf motif for a 'Pool meets Pinball' theme. It's a much more modest project, but the core gameplay carries over.
Moral of the story, value your own work enough to back it up!