The Project Graveyard

Projects

I'm always working on projects. How the process usually goes is like this:

First, I get an idea. If it sticks in my mind for a few days, I'll start working on it. Then, I work until I finish a 'proof of concept'. This could be a line of a recorded song, or coding up the beginning of an app.

At that point, I decide whether to finish the project or to shelf it. When I finish the projects, I post about them here. Otherwise, they just end up collecting dust. I think it's good to share one's failures as well as successes, so here are several project stubs that are in the graveyard:

Music

I make music all the time. However, making a whole song is tons of work. The other day, I was going through my old computer to look for a file, and I found several bits of songs I'd completely forgotten I had worked on.

Snippet 1: Spaseniye

Back in 2023, I got really into religious/liturgical music. One of my favorite composers is Pavel Chesnokov. His life was tragic. By the time he was 30, he'd composed hundreds of sacred choral works, but the 1917 Russian Revolution happened, and under Communist rule it was illegal to create sacred music. The cathedral where he had been choirmaster was torn down by the new regime, and he died of a starvation-induced heart attack while waiting in a bread line. I had sung one of his pieces when I was a member of BYU's barbershop chorus as an undergrad, and wanted to record it. I recorded 8 tracks of me singing the first phrase:

I decided not to pursue one for several reasons: I don't speak Russian, my voice doesn't go high enough for some of the notes, and the song was too long for me to finish.

Snippet 2: Sanctify Us

While I was going through this liturgical music phase, I really wanted to compose a piece of my own. I started, but only got one phrase in:

This song had the same issues as the last one - My voice had a hard time reaching all the parts, and writing a song is even more work that just recording one. (And I don't know Latin, which adds another layer of complexity.)

Snippet 3: Old Maui

I started working on this one when sea shanties were all the rage a few years back. I had recorded the whole Wellerman shanty, and I was having so much fun that I decided to start another one. As with the last two, I recorded the first phrase of the chorus to get the hang of it.

This was the same story as the last two - My vocal range couldn't really do it, and it took so much work. I decided not to finish it, even though it was pretty good.

Snippet 4: Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap is one of my favorite songs. It has gorgeous harmonies, and a very unique style. I've wanted to record it for years, but I haven't had the technology to do the vocoder effect she did in the original. When I downloaded the free trial of Melodyne for my bluegrass song, I tried using it to vocode this piece. I spent several hours doing the first phrase:

Honestly, I might go back and complete this song someday, it sounded pretty good. But, those 35 seconds took me like 4 hours to arrange, record, and tune a first draft. That would mean the whole song would take me like 20 hours to complete. For now, I don't want to record the song that badly.

Games

I've also worked on a couple of games that I decided not to keep pursuing.

Game 1: ASCII RPG

I really like ASCII art games. Before computers were good at graphics processing, one workaround was to use text and other symbols to render the game. I thought it would be cool to create a web-based game that used ascii symbols. (Actually, unicode symbols since there are a lot more of those.) I only got as far as making a character (☻ - unicode symbol \u263B) that can run around a field (and not fall in a teeny lake I made).

I wrote the game in 200 lines of JavaScript, but never more than a prototype.

The colors are a little harsh, but you can watch the player run around the field in this teeny video I made:

Game 2: Space Shooter

You might remember from a blog post I did last year that I was working on a first-person shooter game with a sci-fi vibe. It was pretty cool, but I ran into an insurmountable issue - I'm not good at 3D animation, and it's not a skill I'm willing to learn. Modeling a 3D enemy is hard enough, but making it move correctly is basically impossible. (For me at least.) You can see I got the basics down in the video, but trust me - it's not worth the hassle.

I was really happy with how the game felt, however. The controls feel so smooth, the movement is great, and the guns have a good recoil. You can take a look:

This game isn't quite dead. I'm going to keep the nice movement and controls, but change the aesthetic of the game completely. Based on older games like Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, I'll be using a technique called billboarding. Billboard sprites are 2D cutouts that you can use to render enemies. Instead of animating the movement of 3D characters, I can draw pixel art enemies and animate them by drawing a few frames.

Even though I'll be salvaging some parts of the game, I'm putting it in the 'graveyard' since the space shooter will probably never be finished.

Legos

I have a Lego instagram account Alex Lyman Studios. I've been running it for over a year, posting an original Lego creation 1-2 times each week. It's really fun.

Usually, I get the idea for something and start building it. Sometimes, I hit a roadblock. In that case, I leave the half-built creation on a shelf where it gets dusty until I decide to work on it some more. All of the things in this picture were built at least 6 months ago. No improvements in half a year means they're in the graveyard.

There are some fun ideas here - a mushroom girl in a mushroom patch, Doctor Strange fighting the Red Skull, some little green slugs. Maybe this post will finally get me to finish them.

Conclusion

As I was working on this post, there were several projects that I decided to 'resurrect.' Those didn't make it onto this post, since hopefully they'll get their own posts when I finish them.

Digging in the graveyard was great, since it reminded me that I can always keep working on old things. Even the projects in the graveyard aren't fully 'dead.'

If any of the projects from this post seem exceptionally promising, reach out and let me know! Maybe I'll pick them back up.