In 2015 or so, I started working on this little mod I stupidly called "Admer: The Game".
It was originally gonna be the FPS adaptation of my QBasic text adventure of the same name.
The original text game went something like this: the player woke up in a cave with some TNT and a hungry zombie, with absolutely no memories of how they got there. The player was offered 3 options, only one of which would kill the zombie and blow up the cave, sending the player flying upwards, landing into a wheat field.
The original version of the mod, however, started like this, mostly due to my back-then low mapping experience: the player woke up in a cave with TNT. The player could activate the timer, then run and hide from the blast. Once up there, you could see a house, in which there was a pistol and a note. In the forest ahead, there were 2 zombies. Once you passed that area, you'd find a wheat field.
The cave exit hole It went in a totally different direction. So did I. I was no longer gonna be just a mapper. I was expanding to other areas: texturing, sound editing, modelling, music production, and last but probably also the least, in a way, programming.
The most complex thing I'd done were probably the smoke puffs, and an NPC That was quite a bite to chew. Almost the entire plate. It would've all been fine if I didn't have scope creep. I went from a very simple idea to an idea that just kept growing and growing so that I could never finish it. I couldn't even do 10% of it, with the skills I had back then.
I did not realise that until the summer of 2016, however.
In the summer of 2015, I renamed the mod to "An unknown game", for obvious reasons. My programming "skill" still didn't exist, so the only thing I was able to do was change some constants and copy-paste from tutorials. That presented quite the roadblock.
I could not fix the crash that came with this NPC I copy-pasted from one of the tutorials here:
Another roadblock was the huge lack of experience I had in modelling. I wanted to have custom hand models. I tried, two times at least. But I could never make a hand that looked alright. Funnily enough, this month I made low-poly hands in 2 or 3 days. 6 years really does change things.
And, perhaps the most critical obstacle was voice acting. Let alone trying to find a voice actor, my microphone was bad, my voice was bad too.
So, I just worked on that mod less and less, and I moved back to CS 1.6 mapping. It was a lesson that I learned, but understood only years later, but I didn't feel bad about it at all. It was really fun to work on it in that first-to-second year of modding.
The spirit of "An unknown game" carried over to my Far Cry mod project in 2016, then in 2019, I thought about "reviving" the HL mod under a new name, in the latest iteration of the story. That revival was gonna be called Utopia at Stake. However, I don't think I'll start working on that until the 2030s. I'm working on a game now, which I'm planning to publish on Steam when it gets done in 5 or 6 years.
Nowadays, in the context of Half-Life modding, I work on and maintain ADM. I started working on it in 2018, and it's still an active project, even though I don't work on it in winter months.