Ever since i started making maps for Half-Life my biggest dream was to make a big mod that people would enjoy and remember, i was very inspired by many great mods (Visitors, Residual Life, Azure Sheep, Point of View...) and my intentions always were to make something with the same caliber. This lead me to develop some ambitious projects that were full of interesting ideas that i was very excited to try out but i never were capable to do so since my lack of experience in some aspects of modding and the lack of a team to back me up with such ambitious ideas.
Doing some research i could recover some of those projects and i'm going to detail some of the aspects of them and why they ended up being abandoned.

HARD

This mod was supposed to be a "remake" of a mod with the same name (https://www.runthinkshootlive.com/posts/hard/) wich was pretty bad and unnecessarily difficult. The story in the original was different and i changed it to be more "mature" and "canonical" but it was pretty generic overall, basically you were an FBI agent that was sent to the Black Mesa Research Facility to check some stuff but end up trapped during the resonance cascade incident. I don't really know why i wanted to make a remake of that particular mod and i why i was so obssessed with it, i remember that i spent hours watching gameplay videos of that mod just to know how i would make the maps. I actually did some decent stuff and mapping with this mod and learned a lot of things with it but in the end i realized that it was worthless to put such effort in a "remake" for such a bad mod and this is why i left the project and moved on. Unfortunately i couldn't recover maps or screenshots of how it looked like but it's empty page it's still there so you can check it out.

LINK: https://www.moddb.com/mods/hard1

Last-Shift

It was suppossed to be a collaborative work within me and another argentinian modder. The story was pretty generic too but this time you were a Black Mesa security guard instead of FBI. I originally gave this mod with all the source files and such to this fellow modder i knew so he could make his own mod with it because i had some troubles in my life and i was distancing myself from modding. He did some great stuff with the things i gave to him and actually made a demo wich he shared with me in private, this really inspired me so i decided to began working on it again. The progress was very good and i was satisfied and proud of how things were turning on but all the enthusiasm began to die with the time. The main reason was because i wasn't giving my partner enough participation in the project and i was throwing literally all the work to myself. In the end this exceded me so i decided to cancel the project. This mod actually has some screenshots of the maps on it's main page but i didn't check Wayback Machine so maybe more stuff could be recovered.

LINK: https://www.moddb.com/mods/last-shift

Welcome to Black Mesa

My first mod ever! Not very much to say about this one, i was experimenting with mapping and trying different ideas. The story had a random scientist as protagonist, it was set in a pre-disaster Black Mesa and had a focus in exploration of the facility. I remember that i was very excited with this project since i was getting a lot of attention and encouragement from the community. Truly a nice and interesting experience with a lot of learning. I never took this mod so seriously, i took it like a phase and transitory thing that i used to boost my abilities and as a first touch with the community. The mod's page along with all the screenshots disappeared a long time ago but i've managed to use Wayback Machine to recover an archived page with some screenshots. Seeing this nowadays amazes me a lot and to be honest i think it wasn't a bad start at all. Lastly, i want to remark that this is the first time i got introduced to J.A.C.K wich is the mapping tool i use to this day!

LINK: https://web.archive.org/web/20150216031522/http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-welcome-to-black-mesa

I have some other stuff that i want to share but in the meantime how about you guys? Do you have any abandoned projects you would like to share? This isn't only Half-Life it can be any other game you want! I would be very excited to read your stories!

i had 2 abandoned mods - some people might know the first one, Half-Life: Wall (not War). which was just almost the worst mod i've made. so let me start, Wall was a mod i was trying to make back in January 2015 when i was 9 years old, and the idea of the mod.. well i don't really remember what i was trying to do with that mod, aside from lots of breakable walls. the story was really basic, there was some training hologram thing, and one time it broke so the hologram rooms became real somehow. it was a really stupid story, i was 9 after all haha. i released a shitty 1 level demo of the mod and didn't feel like making more levels so i cancelled it. the mod got really negative reception and for a good reason, it was really bad. the entire level was basically a fullbright corridor with breakable walls, monsters and weapons. unlike the 2nd mod, this mod's page on moddb still exists and you can play it if you REALLY want to.
now for the 2nd abandoned mod, "Half-Life: Generations", the worst mod i tried to make. it was a shitty beta mod that i started to "make" right around March 2015. the idea of the mod was that you could play as the "Ivan the Space Biker" from the HL alpha in the retail levels with alpha weapons and stuff, and you could play as Gordon from the final version of HL in the alpha levels, with retail weapons and stuff. it was kind of a bad idea, and even worse was the mod's page, on the description i said "i need mappers, coders, modellers, etc." which basically meant "i need someone to do all the work for me." my 9 years old brain didn't know that was a REALLY bad thing, and then i stole some shitty beta weapons pack addon for hl1 and it all became a huge trainwreck, so bad that later i contacted moddb to delete the mod page. and that's it, the story of my worst & abandoned mods.
i took a long break from modding HL until 2018 when i started Half-Life: WAR, which is a mod i'm still making and i think it's shaping up really well (don't worry, there i'm not asking anyone to do the whole mod for me lol)

I've had only three real projects I wanted to make for Half-Life, one was unfinished but released, one is still being actively(ish) worked on, and one was dead before it even started.

Overturn

I'd type out a whole backstory about this one but the ModDB page basically does all of that for me.

Link: Overturn

Half-Life: Particle Fusion

I've been working on this since around 2010-ish and do a little bit of stuff for it every now and then since it's literally only me working on it. The only other time someone else works on it is when I ask for some help with programming something I'd like to have. That's about it.

Link: Half-Life: Particle Fusion

Half-Life: Ghosthunter

This was probably the first mod I wanted to do. I think there's a thread on TWHL about it, but I basically just made some crappy reskins and edited some graphics then it never went any farther than that. (I actually have three different threads apparently.)

Link: Half-Life: Ghosthunter 1
Link: Half-Life: Ghosthunter 2
Link: Half-Life: Ghosthunter 3

I once attempted modding back in IDK 2002. But nothing ever came out of it. My English wasn't that great and there weren't enough tutorials that helped me back then. Eventually my English improved and I managed releasing Military Duty 13 years later.

Right now I got this abandoned Mod sitting on my HDD.

Firestorm

https://www.moddb.com/mods/hl-opposing-force-firestorm

I still got all the textures, models, sounds and RMF files related to that mod project. My plan was to eventually merge that mod with my released Military Duty mod to form this into an even larger & massive mod experience similar in length to that of Opposing Force itself. I wish somebody could compile me a Spirit v1.2 with all working Op4 entities included. But I never found a coder able to do so and sticking around till the end. I attempted to incorporate entities such as the Voltigore and the reverse engineered ropes by Solokiller myself many times already but I just won't get the hang of it. So in essence it kept me of merging the 2 mods thus far as I require some vital Spirit features in order to utilize several of my ideas. That makes it basically unlikely that we will ever see contents of Firestorm any time soon.

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I remember "Welcome to Black Mesa" and I was a huge fan of your mod @Cabo Fiambre. In fact mods such as yours served me as inspiration in my very early mapper days. It's sad that you've never finished it.
Should you still own the mapping files you might consider uploading them open source, who knows some other mappers out there might still make good use of it. That way your work wouldn't have been in vain and others can enjoy it. I often wonder how many Gigabyte of Data regarding Half-Life maps and mods are still floating out there throughout the world - unreleased.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/welcome-to-black-mesa <<< There's even another mod with the same name than yours. But that's unrelated to your ancient mod or? Either way it's equally dead and never got released.

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"Particle Fusion" is another mod that I follow closely @Supersonik. It most certainly looks stunning and I hope we will see it one day in the future don't let it die. Don't let any of your amazing mod projects die. Don't you dare.

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.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.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.

I've cancelled more Half-Life mods than I dare count. My older posts on TWHL are absolutely filled with absurd ideas that never got further than a badly written plot summary on the forums and screenshots from a single map.

There is one that made it as far as MODDB though.

Half-Life: Off it's f*cking head! was a joint effort between myself and a handful of TWHL guys, collectively called Demonic Puppy Games. It was going to be a collection of completely random ideas thrown at a wall with a full campaign and insane plotline. We had a few custom features coded but never shown off, a couple of maps and even a bunch of custom music created. It would not have been a good mod, but it was fun to work on for a few months. There are videos floating around on YouTube from a couple of the people involved, but you'll have to find those yourself if you really want to...

Lets see...

There was USS Bravo, a mod that was supposed to be like USS Darkstar but with brighter maps. I made a dorm room, a few corridors, and a bridge where the plot development would happen, complete with a fully-functional elevator. That lasted for a day or two before I dropped it and deleted the source files outright to save disk space.

After that, I switched to a mod with a name I can't remember that was going to be set during the Seven Hour War, but in a universe where Half-Life the game existed as well as Half-Life the events, so the player character had a big crate with a fully-functional HEV suit replica and a poster of Alyx in their apartment. They would then attempt to use the elevator in their apartment complex, only for it to literally break apart and drop them into the sewers, which they would have to navigate to get into the basement of the office building across the street. That's where I ran out of ideas and dropped the project, though IIRC a partial backup of that (single map) mod made it into Castle Disposed.

Once I dropped that, I started a brand new mod that I called USS Bravo, originally based off of USS Darkstar. If anything I got even less far than my first attempt, but the maps were much better looking and featured Otis as well as Barney as guards (IIRC I just grabbed the model from Blue Shift and plopped it on a monster_generic, as this was before I started using Spirit of Half-Life)

Speaking of Spirit, I downloaded some unofficial mongrel build of Spirit that called itself 1.7 and had features that the base mod didn't such as a suppressor for the pistol and a system that changed what arms the player had based on whether or not the had the HEV suit (neither of these was configurable or could be disabled) and tried to make a prison breakout mod that I think was set after the Black Mesa incident, like you had been kidnapped by the Black Ops guys? All I really remember from that is that I had a security camera you could use.

Then, I started yet another mod, this time set directly during the black mesa incident, where you played as a janitor (Unbeknownst to me that had apparently been done). This is another one that didn't make it past 1 or 2 maps because I had done literally zero planning, but, like the 7-hour war mod, a partial version of the first map ended up in Castle Disposed, albeit with the Blue Shift and Opposing Force BMRF propaganda posters I used replaced with somewhat tasteless demotivational posters by Tetsu0.

The only notable HL mod I canceled aside from all that garbage was Colony 42, a mod that was just, once again, USS Darkstar with more lights, but this time on a space station instead of a ship, but which still somehow saw the light of day and was apparently finished enough that Urby wants to remake it, though I did at one point briefly consider also making a full campaign addon or mod for They Hunger where you played as a person who was not at all having a good recovery in a convalescent home.

I started learned programming when I was 11 so I could make new weapons for Half-Life. No mod came out of it but it lead to a career in software development, which as far as careers go, is pretty okay I guess. It's good money, but I would probably be happier working with people. Hopefully I can save up and retire early to make up for that, perhaps somewhere with more agreeable winter climate and sun hours, like New Zealand. And I'll make an awesome Half-Life mod in 2040. It will have func_vehicle and throwing knives.

In the early 2000s a couple of my friends from school and I decided to start a mod project, despite knowing nothing about how to make one. I don't remember much about it, not even its title. We made a webpage with a few details and our plans, but that's as far as it got. If I remember correctly, this type of thing was kind of popular among Half-Life fans back then. I followed a few other mods that never made it beyond a homepage with a plot and sometimes screenshots of a basic map or a reskinned model or something.

It wasn't until 2019 that I made an actual attempt at learning how to make a GoldSrc mod. So currently I'm still working on my first real mod, I've abandoned a few maps, but overall it's still alive.

Hey everyone! Thanks for passing by and share yours experiences! I enjoy reading them a lot! I also want to say that i admire all of your work and that everyone here is truly an inspiration for me and that is the reason i kept modding for Half-Life and coming back to this site to this day.

To 23-Down who asked if i had some of the source maps from my older mods, i'm so sorry but unfortunately i couldn't recover any of them since i deleted all my old files. Also, thank you for being such a nice person to me when i was taking my first steps with Half-Life mods i really appreciate that!

I'm going to add some other mods that never were to my list!

Uncommon Courage

I started to work on this one since the creator helped me with some problems i had with some models and because i saw a lot of potential on it. It didn't had a developed story and it was my first time working on a project with someone else so i was very enthusiastic about it. I made a few maps and modified a bunch of stuff to give the mod more personality but it never went too far. I decided to leave because i felt that i was doing all the work and i wasn't recieving enough help from the creator so i contacted him and gave everything i was working on so he could continue. I think i shouldn't have joined that project in the first place but as i said earlier i saw potential. I remember that the creator had some serious issues in real life and i hope he is doing fine.

LINK: https://www.moddb.com/mods/uncommon-courage

Foxtrot Uniform

Just an idea, i was thinking of making this an oppossing force mod since i never worked with that game before. The story was about that guy called Tower (the one we see in the intro and as a multiplayer character) but it went as far as that. Nothing was ever developed for this project but i think it was an interesting idea for an oppossing force since i never played an oppossing force mod with a black character as protagonist.

BONUS!
While i was making some cleanup i found a paper with some of the names for the chapters of Last-Shift. It looks pretty bad and some parts are written in spanish that is my native language but i thought it would be some interesting stuff to share, who knows maybe someone else makes use of some of those names!

I don't have any mods that never were. Just a few that are taking a long time to be.