I’ve canceled more game projects than I’ve released, and that’s okay

Ideas, ideas, ideas. Any artist knows the vicious cycle: You get an idea to make something, start on it, get a new idea while making said thing, proceed to neglect the previous thing to pursue that new idea, rinse and repeat. Over time, this can lead to several projects that get stuck in limbo or are outright canceled. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

My game studio, Studio 7e (not a legal entity (yet)), has certainly fallen victim to the ideation-neglect cycle. Since its formation in 2020 under the name GT Games, my studio has formally announced 10 games, and only 4 of those 10 have been officially released. And those are just the games I’ve decided to put the 7e name on; I have even more canned games outside that. 

In this article, I want to go through my back catalog of games, whether they’ve been released, canned, or somewhere in between, to see why they ended up that way, and to show that cancelling a game isn’t always the worst outcome.

Six Hours with Scratch Cat (1 and 2) - Released

Yes, Studio 7e got started by making FNAF fangames on Scratch. Hey, you’ve gotta start somewhere! Despite Six Hours 1 being the first game released under the studio banner, both games are actually remakes of even older games of the same names (the remakes originally had a “Definitive Edition” subtitle, but I later dropped it because those old games are so bad they’re not even worth mentioning). For the purposes of this article, assume I’m referring to the modern remakes unless stated otherwise.

Six Hours 1 was made during the pandemic over the course of a month and a half. Most of the development speed came from the fact that I was basically making a one-to-one clone of FNAF 1 gameplay-wise, using Tech Rules’ video as a guide. Despite it being just a shameless clone of Scott Cawthon’s work, I’m still proud of it, and it set the stage for my game development journey going forward.

Six Hours 2 actually began development shortly before the first game was even released, but took much longer to develop, being worked on sporadically for a period of nearly two years before its eventual release in 2022. The layout of the building in this game is slightly more original compared to FNAF 2, but mechanically it’s still incredibly similar. This time around, I referenced Bubblegumbeanie’s Google Doc for how the gameplay worked.

Looking back at these two games, I definitely wish I had gone with something more original for my proper gamedev debut, but releasing these games was still a net positive for me. I don’t think I would be where I am today if either of them were canceled.

Super Toad Adventure! - Canceled

Yeah, another fangame. I promise, things get more original later on. This game was one of my older ideas; if I remember correctly, I originally started drawing things up for it in the 7th grade.

For a little context on this one, in 2017 I started a parody account on Scratch called @THE-TOAD-EMPIRE. One of the things I wanted to make as part of the account was a 2D platformer where you played as a Toad on a quest to rescue Captain Toad from an angry Mario.

Development on this game restarted two separate times. The original version was built with Scratch again, but due to either the limitations of the platform or my shoddy coding (probably both), it lagged way too much for my liking. So I pivoted to making the game as a Super World within Super Mario Maker 2. It made sense at the time, as I didn’t yet have access to or experience with any other game engine, and this way I wouldn’t have had to re-implement Mario physics.

Later on, I ended up reconsidering that decision as I wanted to be able to show the game off online as well as the fact that I didn’t want to lock it behind a console and game that many people may not have. So I pivoted AGAIN to making the game using GameMaker Studio 2, which I purchased specifically to make Super Toad Adventure.

But over time, motivation to keep working on the game diminished. It was even less original than Six Hours with Scratch Cat, and I realized it would probably just end up being taken down by Nintendo anyway. So in July of 2021, I announced that the game was officially canceled.

I’ll be honest, I had nearly completely forgotten about how important the development of this game was to my gamedev journey. It’s the reason the Studio 7e Discord is the Studio 7e Discord instead of the Six Hours Discord, and it’s the reason I purchased and started using my game engine of choice. So even though this game never saw the light of day, the process of its creation was completely and totally worth it.

Bust a Move - Canceled

In August of 2020, Scratch user @theultimateguy02 (now going by Digibutter and/or Lammi) published an animation of her sona dancing to a song from WarioWare DIY, titled “bust a move” in all lowercase. I found the animation delightful, so I decided to make a rhythm game out of it during a family trip.

Before continuing, I feel I need to get two things out of the way. First, I was not aware of the Bubble Bobble spin-off series Bust-A-Move when making this game; the matching names are entirely coincidental. Additionally, I started making this game very shortly BEFORE Friday Night Funkin’ went viral, so I didn’t copy it. I copied DDR instead.

Development of this game didn’t get very far. I got one song finished and released an Early Access version, but after that, development stalled. Turns out, Scratch is not an engine known for precise timing. A lot of development time was spent just trying to keep things in sync.

Eventually, I got bored of working on it and handed over development to somebody else, and things were looking up. They even released an announcement video about a big content update, with a scheduled release for August 2021. But then, that person seemingly deleted their entire internet presence overnight. To this day, I still have no idea where they went or why.

And so, the game ended up canceled. The unfinished Early Access build is still up on my Scratch profile, collecting dust, never to be finished. And to be honest, it’s probably better that way. From the development of this game, I learned that you need to use the right tools for the job; you really shouldn’t be making a rhythm game in an engine where timing is an afterthought. As well as that, if you’re working in a team, you need to make sure you communicate and have reliable teammates, or things will just fall apart.

The Stairs are Closed - Shelved?

Before I eventually bought GameMaker to make Super Toad Adventure for the third time, I originally wanted to earn enough to buy it by selling a little puzzle game about elevators. Made with (you guessed it) Scratch, The Stairs are Closed would have been the first game I’d have charged money for if it had actually come out, at a measly $5. Was it a solid plan? No, not at all. I seriously doubt anyone would pay any money for a Scratch game, but I digress.

The original idea for The Stairs are Closed’s gameplay was that you were a little dude in an elevator trying to get to the top. You’d have to solve little puzzles to the sides of your elevator in order to gain access to higher floors, until reaching the end. There were also unique challenge levels that would throw unique twists on the gameplay, like a race against time or extra horizontal elevator movement.

But for whatever reason, after the elevator’s up-and-down movement was implemented, I just kind of… stopped. Eventually I scrounged together enough money to get GameMaker without needing TSaC, and I wanted to restart development in the new engine, but I never did. 

When the Scratch version was canned, I uploaded what had been completed to my secondary Scratch account for people to look at, so at least there’s that. To this day, The Stairs are Closed is still a game idea that I think has merit, even if a complete rework of the gameplay may be in order. Right now its development status is treated as an inside joke more than anything (à la Metroid Dread and Silksong before they actually came out). I don’t know if I’ll ever revisit the concept, but for now, the stairs remain open.

Pentris - Released

This section will be pretty quick. One day in 2021 I had a random idea: “What if you took the shapes from Tetris, and added an extra block?” Turns out many other people had the same idea in the past, but I decided to make my own version anyway. 

Following a tutorial by YellowAfterLife, I whipped up the first release of Pentris in only three days (still my fastest turnaround for a non-GBTK game). Despite me purchasing GameMaker to make Super Toad Adventure and The Stairs are Closed, Pentris turned out to be the first game made with the engine that I released.

The game has gotten many updates over the years, but the gameplay has gone pretty much unchanged. It’s just Tetris, but way, WAY harder. The pieces are bigger, but I didn’t size up the board accordingly, so it becomes much more difficult to get things to fit together. But honestly, I kinda like it that way. 

Moral of the story here? Don’t be afraid to just whip up something silly.

Restoring the L.I.G.H.T. - Canceled

This game was to be my entry for GameMaker’s Amaze Me Game Jam, but I didn’t finish it in time, so I scrapped it. Here was the original synopsis:

“In a post-AI apocalypse world, the machines punished humanity for rebelling against them by blocking out the sun. You, the last member of the resistance, arrive at their fortress. The switch to restore the sun is behind a gate locked by six colored keys. You must venture through six arenas of challenge to open the gate and restore that Luminous Illuminated Glowy Hot Thing you haven't seen in a while. Good luck, challenger.”

What a creative acronym. Regardless, I really bit off more than I could chew with this game. I wasn’t even close to the skill level needed to finish something that ambitious in the amount of time I had for the jam. But even though Restoring the L.I.G.H.T. got canceled, it wasn’t quite dead…

DARKSHOT - Shelved

A little over half a year after Restoring the L.I.G.H.T. was canned, GameMaker announced the NoticeMe Game Jam with the theme of “Then the Night Changed Everything.” I realized that the idea of RtL fit that theme perfectly, so I recycled it into DARKSHOT.

The idea for the gameplay of DARKSHOT was what I called a “2D Parkour Shooter” (because apparently I had never heard of an Action Platformer before). You’d be a guy with a gun that would shoot, jump, and dodge through 8 towers full of evil robots to undo their blocking of the sun.

DARKSHOT ultimately fell victim to the same problem its predecessor did: Too much work, too little time. However, this time I actually saw potential in the game, and so I continued to work on it.

In 2022, I went to a short summer gamedev camp at the University of Utah, and ended up putting together a short 3D shooter level with Unreal Engine 4 based on the idea of DARKSHOT. It was never intended to reflect what the real game would become, but I figured I’d mention it here.

Later on in 2023, I opened the GameMaker project of DARKSHOT after a while of not working on it, and found myself underwhelmed. It was buggy, poorly coded, and the gameplay was mediocre at best. I realized that if I wanted to release something good, it would be better to start from scratch. So, that version of DARKSHOT was canned.

Fast forward to summer 2025, and I decided to experiment again with the concept after getting involved with the Warpdrive indie console project. This time, I decided to move in a direction closer to that summer camp demo, with DOOM-like FPS gameplay. Since Warpdrive is based on TurboWarp (a more performant mod of Scratch with support for community extensions), I went back to my home turf of block-based coding, following Griffpatch’s raycasting tutorial series.

But even with the increased performance of TurboWarp over Scratch, the game was still too laggy for my liking, plus all the other downsides of making a 3D game with Scratch blocks.

And so, DARKSHOT was shelved once again. I do still want to actually make this game in the future, but now just isn’t the right time. The game’s second shelving wasn’t all bad, though! For that iteration of the game, I created a 3D model of one of the robot enemies, which is now Studio 7e’s de facto mascot, appearing on the News and 404 pages of the website. The robot also DID make an appearance in a future game, though not visually. But before I can tell you THAT story, I have to tell you THIS story…

Six Hours with Scratch Cat 3 - Canceled

So far in this article I’ve been going in a rough chronological order of when these games were announced, with one quite large exception. Ideas for Six Hours 3 began stirring before the remakes of 1 and 2 (and by extension, Studio 7e) even existed. Announced during the development of the previous two and starting development in 2023, Six Hours 3 was to be my most ambitious game yet.

But there were a few small problems… Namely, I didn’t properly plan anything out; I just started making it, hoping things would come to me (they didn’t). I actually wrote a whole separate article on all the reasons the game was canceled, but that was the big one. Just years of zero progress.

Before it was eventually canceled, I knew I needed to continue the story I had built up in the previous Six Hours games, but the third game was just not working out. But as luck would have it, a unique opportunity in college would open the door…

Welcome to Victorville - Released

In the fall of 2025, I took a class at the University of Utah called Storycrafting for Games, where the end goal was to produce a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style gamebook. When we started entering the planning phases, I realized this was the perfect opportunity to tell a critically important story from the Six Hours canon.

I knew I wanted to make a text adventure called Welcome to Victorville since September of 2020. But for the longest time, I didn’t know how exactly I wanted the story to go. I had shown glimpses of it in certain cutscenes of Six Hours 2, but those glimpses were everything that I had come up with for the full story they were trying to tell. So in the course of a single assignment, I basically made up the overall main story of Welcome to Victorville on the spot. By the end of the semester, I had created the original version of the game using Twine.

Starting right around New Year’s, I started experimenting with what I wanted the game to look like if I were to make it a full-fledged proper game using GameMaker. But I liked what I saw so much, I just kept going until, on July 31, 2026, Welcome to Victorville was released as my first Steam game. Later on, it even got a physical CD-ROM release through We the Indies!

This game was one of the reasons I decided to cancel Six Hours 3, as instead I decided to retool the story that game was going to tell into the eventual sequel to Victorville, coming who knows when. That game is still in the planning phase, but it’s shaping up to be really cool.

That’s all for the games I’ve put the 7e name on, but there is one more game I want to touch on:

UNDERTRASH - In Development(?)

I can never escape from making fangames, can I? After DELTARUNE Chapters 3 and 4 dropped in 2025, people started drawing fan art of the characters, and as in any fandom, shipping ensued. Eventually somebody (not quite sure who) had the idea to put Spamton and Tenna into Undertale’s garbage dump area, creating a community AU that I ended up very much enjoying. Being the developer that I am, I decided to make a game about it.

I first announced UNDERTRASH a little over a year ago now, but development still hasn’t gotten very far. It’s actually already restarted once, because I originally started making it in TurboWarp (I need to stop doing that) before later switching to the Undertale Cyan Engine. I said on the website that I wanted to get it mostly done by the end of 2026, and considering it’s October now, that’s probably not happening. Being busy with college plus a part-time job, I’ve had basically no time to work on it. But it’s coming! I swear!

Conclusion

So, what did I learn from all this? The main thing is, if things aren’t working out, it’s okay to start over. You’ve probably heard it a million times now, but it really IS about the journey and not the destination. By working on those failed attempts, you gain experience and figure out what went wrong to avoid it next time. And maybe there isn’t a next time for that specific idea, and that’s okay too! 

A large part of gamedev is just trial and error, after all. But I’m sure you’ve also heard this phrase before: “Perfect is the enemy of good.” This is equally true. You can’t go chasing perfection; otherwise, you’ll never put out anything at all. I’ve definitely fallen victim to that myself. It’s all about balance: It’s okay to fail, but make sure you fail upwards. Eventually you’ll find yourself at the top.

Be sure to take the elevator on the way back down, though; I hear the stairs aren’t open.

About the author: Taylor S. (Studio 7e)
	Taylor "Tboogle" S. is an independent game developer from southern California. He is a senior student at the University of Utah, studying for a Bachelor of Science in Games. Getting his start on Scratch, he has been making games since he was ten years old. Now publishing under Studio 7e since 2020, he has been gradually building up a connected storyline of games, with Welcome to Victorville as its latest entry.
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