Ask HN: Show your failed projects and share a lesson you learned
I worked solo for three years on a 3D cyberpunk shooter all in a custom C++ engine. It was a hybrid single/multiplayer idea, where you would progress through the campaign and encounter other players at the same time. The twist was, in keeping with the cyberpunk theme, once you got to the end it would be revealed that all the players were actually bots the whole time.<p>At first I was going to commit 100% to the deception. There wasn’t going to be real multiplayer in the game at all, it would all be fake. But then I realized the riot I would have on my hands if I actually tried to sell it as a multiplayer game and there wasn’t real multiplayer. So I wrote real multiplayer. By the end, the project was big enough for a team of 100. I was making cinematics, running a Discord server, trying to figure out how to train an AI to play my increasingly complicated game, it was insane. I ran out of money.<p>Trailer:
<a href="https://youtu.be/QnMz27nPbB4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/QnMz27nPbB4</a><p>Code:
<a href="https://github.com/etodd/lasercrabs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/etodd/lasercrabs</a><p>Dev blog:
<a href="https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=49277" rel="nofollow">https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=49277</a>