The Features Cemetery

Game jams are battlefields in which many of the features we imagined for our game valiantly perish. No matter how much we wanted them and how important they are, times and unexpected events sometimes get the better of us.

In this topic I would like to commemorate the features that we loved but cut due to time constraints, so write here if you want to pay homage to these features by sharing your experience and perhaps telling the story of what made your projects what they are now.

P.S. Everyone cope with loss in a special and unique way. We have paid homage to our beloved features through a game about scale down and removing features. Here’s the link if you’ve missed it: https://crisschiaff.itch.io/scale-down

When I look back I am like this.

I could have put in 1 more feature.  I could have got more. I  threw away so much time, you have no idea.

edit: I got bored and made a video about this. I hope you find it at least a little funny.

I wanted to use a CRT shader to enhance the "retro" feel of my game. I found a free CRT shader for Godot, integrated it, dialed it down a bit so it didn't interfere with visual clarity too much... sadly, it didn't work properly in the web version.

Then, I considered adding the shader to the Windows version but remove it from the web version, but ultimately I decided to keep things simple and cut it entirely. Seems to have been the right choice - almost everybody played the web version only, I have exactly five downloads for the Windows version.

My lesson here is that web is king on itch.io and in future game jams, I'll most likely focus on that platform exclusively. It also shows that time constraints aren't the only constraints.

I was planning to have a relaxing mode after you get stressed with my game (https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2023/rate/2395305)  🤣 Unfortunately, I didn't have the time for it! I might do it later, tho.

I had a lot of fun making the procedural slicing system. So, the idea was to be able to create "fruit art" and share your "paintings". I started working on it, and got the basics working, but didn't have time to polish the workflow/experience.

We did not have time to fully balance the level and abilities, as we expected to have at least 2 levels. But unfortunately, due to lack of time we didn't have time to make a smoother entrance for players.

Our game: https://mikle305.itch.io/alieno

We wanted to implement a feature to scale the player shooting the magic ray in a mirror but we had to make a choice: we either polished our current work, or we tried to implement a possibly game-breaking feature with more dynamics around the map to make good use of it.

At the end, we decided to postpone the implementation of self-scaling for future patches, but it still hurts as it would've been quite unique and interesting if well implemented 🥲

Here's a link to our game Scale Tale if you want to try it out 😊

There were many features I wanted to add, apart from also putting more effort in the UI and sound effects, but one that it was requested a lot by my few play testers (friends and family, of course) was the ability to have a second chance inside a level so that you could continue without needing to go back to the first wave of the level.

I thought that maybe you could have only one chance per level. Another that I thought, is that you can gain some kind of points, and pay for having that second chance. However, time wasn't enough and I didn't implement anything.

Take a look at the game and you can also suggest what additional features can be added! I'm planning on improving it. 

https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2023/rate/2394663

I was very happy with how my game came out overall (Banished is what it's called) But I had planned on a rain-world-like audio system for it. Those of you who have played rain world know what I mean and those of you that haven't have missed out on the greatest indie game ever created and that ever will be created. For those that have played but don't remember: In rain world the sound changes realistically depending on where the player is. When underwater all the sounds muffle and it plays bubbly sounds that are mind blowingly realistic. I had all of this planned out for mine too. When you start Banished there are a lot of birds singing in the trees and the occasional hog or goat calling in the distance, and the music in the background is calm and somewhat foreshadowing. Well that's how the sound ended up being accross the whole game. But it was supposed to change when you went underwater to a bubbly drumming music and sounds of bubbles and water flowing and whales and fish calling, and when in a cave the music would be deep and ominous, and the sounds in the background would change to stalactites dripping and wind howling through the caverns and the padding of unseen feet through the dank floor... alas I had not time. I even got so far as downloading the sound fx but couldn't impliment them. Ah well I'll update it later.
There was also no save system because Godots "store_var()" function isn't working. When I found that out I decided it was impossible to save and load my game data but then I found out that "store_string()" is working so now I have to convert all my data to strings, store it to file as a string, and then when loading it I have to read the file as text, put the text (sting), into y variables, and finally convert back to floats, Vector2s, and bools, from those stings. So yeh really inefficeint for the computer and for me so I still don't have it working totally cause it's just so tedious. But i do plan to do it in the future.
If you've read this far thank you for wasting your tie with me. If you would like to waste more of you time I would really apriciate ratings on  Banished (Again you can find it here) Thank you for your time and energy!

~Bad Badger Programming

I have killed countless babies (ideas) throughout the jam, but none are as important as these:

In my game half of your time will be spent punching, and my fd had told me since the 3rd week starts, that i should add monster "being punched" reactions.

I wasn't familiar with unity animations and delayed making it in any shapes or forms. Turns out it is just a doShake() call and set it to operate in lateupdate and i can secure a very basic flinch animation on the boss.

My ultraman-like Giant also should have gotten a finisher move (imagine that!) but i just delayed that indefinitely for more important stuff (which i did not regret arranging my priorities like that)

Also i have always been planning to add 3d look sensitivity and invert axis to my game. I even did audio volumes settings, but never went far enough to do that sensitivity thing... And then a streamer actually needed it in order to enjoy a game. Also i still haven't published it to my friend circles because one of them also use the look camera with invert.

Luckily i have a plan to make even more games of this genre, so i look forward to one day implement all of them at once.

We made a turn-based RPG for this jam and it was extremely ambitious. While we did manage to balance the game as we went, there were a lot of things that we really wanted that we simply didn't have time for.

Rate Suns, Moons, & Boons! by CitizenDevelopers, CitDevChris, cman1526, michaelha, Chris - CDT for Game Off 2023 - itch.io

Suns, Moons, and Boons Feature Graveyard:

• Spend dragon scales to purchase boons/upgrades after each boss level
• Perfect hits: timed user input to cause a critical strike on your attack
• "Belly Bump" final boss ability that would move his teammates to the front of the turn order
• Special Attack animations. Our artist created awesome effect animations for special attacks and ultimates that would have felt really good visually when activated!
• General boons/upgrades that applied to all heroes: Hit Chance, Crit Chance, Crit Bonus, Armor, etc
• General juice. There were many visual elements that we would have liked to choreograph better if we had the time. It felt pretty polished even without giving ourselves time to take a pass at things aimed solely at game feel.
• Variable difficulties with tuned enemy stat sheets and more intelligent enemy/ability selection for the monsters
• The "you win" screen could have used some love. We went with a Star Wars scroll at the end, but would have loved to put some time into a cut scene and art.
• Sound FX: We  managed to sneak in the essentials, but our designer had a lot more in store for SMB. If only!
• Battle Chant: After boss kills, we wanted characters to have some dialog that went with their "Victory" animation. A couple examples:
  
  • Pally: your scales will adorn my body as armor!         Rogue: It sounds creepy when you say it like that.
  • Warlock: My eye enjoys watching your defeat!      Rogue: Your eye sees defeat, my daggers ensure it!
• Some items that were a little too ambitious and we realized quickly was out of scope for a 30 day jam:
  • Quests and Achievements
  • Overworld Map and levels
  • Discoverable new heroes to add to the party

If we had one more week, we'd likely have rounded out the Sound FX and added the Special Attack animations first. Those were top of the backlog when we called it a jam.  The jam was great, we had a lot of momentum, but tying it up at the end was bittersweet.

Initially planned on my game having a narrative revolving a mad scientist creating an AI that turns against him.

The original story pitch was: "Mad Scientist creates a sentient AI that he was going to use for world domination. One problem though, he forgot to turn the morality crank from a hundred to zero. This ethical AI then turns against him taking control of his whole lab only leaving him with his first invention, the SCALE gun." The plan was to have some hopefully "funny" interactions and dialog with these two. Unfortunately halfway through the month, I was still behind programming some essential stuff for the gameplay and haven't even started with the art. So I decided to scrap the whole narrative thing, though I did repurpose the dialog system to be used for the tutorials.

In terms of gameplay mechanics, I planned on including another tool, the "Grappling Hook" which was the 2nd tool I thought of and probably the one I spent the most time programming. Ended up scrapping it since I felt it was cluncky to use and there were still a lot a bugs with it. I also felt like there were too many tools which may distract from the main theme which was scaling things. There were also additional interactions between the differentl tools (e.g. objects that can only be destroyed when scaled down, anchor points for the grappling hook that only works when they are scaled to the right size, not moving ,etc.). A lot were killed due to time constraints, others were murdered for the sake of better gameplay.

Lastly, there were supposed to be more levels - a total of 20 to be exact with 5 levels for each new tool and a new environment and theme to go along with it. The problem was that there were only about 3 days left before the jam ends so I ended up sticking with the placeholder tileset and background.

Looking back, I definitely OVERSCOPED and OVERESTIMATED what I can do in a month especially since this is just my 2nd game jam while still learning a new engine (transitionng from very basic Unity knowledge to Godot). But overall, I'm just happy I was able to finish a (mostly) working game in time.

Here's the link to my game if anyone wants to try it out: Mad Lab by John Rolan Ferrera (itch.io) :)

Had a lot of fun playing your game. With the scale theme, this is a great idea for a topic. Scaling down scope is hard!

In previous jams, I tend to make the mistake of jamming as many features as possible... at the expense of polish! Trying to change that these days!

Our team of two made Mythic Battles, a turn-based based battle game based on Mesopotamian mythology and inspired by games like HOMM3.

Features that made it: Voiced story, god-given boons, spells, 3 levels, hex-based battle grid, enemy AI

I would love to finish the game so here are some future features hopefully: 8 more levels to finish the story, elements on the map to add more strategy to battles, more spells and boons to unlock, more animations (eg hurt, casting etc).

Definitely a few things we ended up having to scrap that would have been great to add. We made a puzzle platformer about changing the scale of objects (https://raptorspank.itch.io/sigea-ascent) and along the way we ran out of time for several features. First, we wanted to have objects that you couldn't scale at first but as you made it through the level, we were going to let you increase your power and therefore also let you scale larger objects. We got the feature working so far as making objects that could only be scaled after reaching a certain minimum amount of power but we never had time to add ways to increase your power.

A couple of features that did make it, we wanted to expand on as well. We have fans that will throw you further if you scale the fan up or will push you less if you scale it down. Unfortunately the current fans only work for pushing you upwards. We wanted to add fans that would be able to push you any direction so we could add some to the outside of the building that would push you off unless you shrunk them first and other sorts of puzzles with them but we didn't have the time to re-factor the code to use vectors instead. 

Of course there is also plenty of art stuff we didn't get done, like creating player animations and adding different clothing/devices to the player. We also wanted to add a town around our tower and floating islands above but we were definitely a little too optimistic with thinking about those. Overall though, we got our most important ideas in at least.

Ah man, I wasn't even sure how far I was gonna get with my game. I tried to build it in a way where I could drop more things in as time went on. Here's a few features that got cut that each would have made a significant gameplay difference:

• Exploding Barrels. It's a FPS for crying out loud.
• Special Abilities for Weapons. Sniper Rounds that pass through enemies. Exploding shotgun bursts that cause splash damage. Arcing bolts of electricity and lingering fire damage over time. More weapon variety would have made those upgrades both more compelling and strategic.
• Enemies spawning in over time. More enemies, coming for all sides, would have significantly upped the paranoia, tension, and difficulty.
• More enemies types. Enemies that shoot at you, stationary turrets, and enemies which move faster than you do and rush in, they all didn't have time to get made and implemented, but would have significantly rounded out the enemy roster.
• Roguelike elements to boost player movement mechanics, like double jump, dash, wall-running, etc. Plus speed upgrades, health boosts, etc. There'd be periodic terminals with choices. You'd have to choose between these more defensively-oriented upgrades and your weapon upgrades. And if you die, it'd be back to square one. But that wouldn't be so bad because...
• More levels, so every run was different. And you'd find a different assortment of weapons each time. With dozens more unique taunts from your adversary as well, of course.

The thing about a game like Blitzkraft, it kind of can be scaled up or down as far as I can imagine... but in the end, a month is only 31 days, so I made my choices to deliver a package that feels more or less complete rather than a broken and incomplete mess. I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed developing in this genre though. I might be back someday...