The Pileup

My ideas graveyard gets a public home

Ideas are ~worthless

In my six-ish years of performing and writing comedy, I only finished two pilots: one about a girl writing for late-night TV in an underground post-apocalyptic city, and a mystery pilot of a hippie accidentally killing his cult-leader neighbor. Unfortunately, it turns out that a pilot on its own is also ~worthless. (Standup is maybe the only art form where an idea can be a mostly-finished product!)

Hence, the ideas graveyard:

-“The Christmas List”, A Christmas rom-com where a guy gets a list of all the perfect women for him in NYC. He spends the year trying to meet/date these women before finding out he should be looking for the person he would be perfect for (his best friend or something, idk.)

-A guy with the name Adam Sandler gets roped into an art fraud scheme attempting to capitalize on Sandler’s fame. The real Sandler shows up to save our hero, only to turn heel, admitting that he’s in on the scheme (trying to sell his brother’s shitty glassblowing as fine art.)

-Humor piece: an intro to the great American novel, written by A Guy Who Totally Also Could’ve Written A Novel

New medium, new ideas

In 2021 I started teaching myself game design to learn some coding. This fall, I’m starting an MFA program at the NYU Game Center. With game engines, a single person CAN see an idea through from start to finish… it’s just stupidly hard. When you’re bad at coding, art, game structure, development, sound design… you get wayyy more ideas than finished products. So, a new graveyard:

-“Universail”, a space yacht-racing game where you pilot a luxury sunship around the planets, using gravity and solar waves to build speed

-“Brainrot”, mobile — a high-stim game where you play two minigames at once, based on dopamine-heavy TikToks that have multiple things on screen at once. (Pet the cat! Rearrange the furniture! Win the podcast argument! Play subway surfers!) Inspired by a nice comment I got on my game jam game.

-“Mini Nimitz”, I actually got kinda far in developing this one. It’s an arcade style RTS where you control an aircraft carrier, launching plane sorties and submarines. Inspired by this very good video on the Battle of Midway. Maybe someday I’ll return to this one (ha ha)

-“The G League”, a roided-up NBA star gets kicked to the G League, filled with eastern European teens and gnomes on crutches. Rhythm minigames build combos to rack up obscene points against people 1/3rd your size

-“Blade Hands”, DCSS-but-good (add animations, sound, simpler art style, more tile-based movement, incentivize fast turns like speed chess…)

-“Gunf”, golf with a gun

-“Overworlds Only”, 100% dungeon-free!

-"Enter the Mainframe”, a fast-paced typing minigame collection that turns Hacker Typer into an actual game.

-"A Witch In The Woods”, roguelike based on The VVitch. You’re a witch living on the outskirts of a 1600’s Puritan village. Build powers by haunting people (giving them boils, possessing them, eating babies, etc.) and hide during the day (turn into a pile of hay, transform your home into a gnarled oak…) Eventually they form watch parties and churches that try to smite you, you win if you consume everyone and return the town to nature.

-“Good Enough!”, lazy detective game where you’re tasked with closing each case as easily as possible, doing the least paperwork.

I’m gonna try to keep this updated

(I don’t know if you can even update posts on Substack.) But if you can, I’ll pop back in here occasionally to add more game ideas that will, almost certainly, never see the light of day. If you’re reading this and want to collaborate/make art/develop any of these, I’d be more than happy to.