Phew! After finishing and releasing my game, I'm feeling good. Sadly I had to leave a few things out as the deadline approached.And I was curious what others had to leave out. So I made this thread!

I had to drastically cut down the number of buddy variants in my game for wont of time, as well as the number of events and gear items. If I make an update after the judging concludes I'll have to widen those. I also had to leave out a few enemies I made graphical assets for that I couldnt think of a good pattern for.

Maybe in a later version!

I wish I could have put more time into the music as well! It was whipped up last minute as the deadline crashed into me very suddenly.

I also had intentions to make a lady set of sprites for the player character and buddies and to allow people to choose which they wanted, but that got cut for time as well.

What did you have to leave out? I love to hear about this kind of thing!

Oh goodness, I had to leave out a lot I wanted to include when I realized Inform 7 was a bit harder to work with than I was expecting.  Learning about conversations especially was a challenge to get down within the month I had to work with, so I only included a few topics the player can ask in my game.  It's also super specific about what the player says to understand things and give replies, so I had to make sure that was extra stuff for players who wanted to learn more about the world I built and not worth points or something unfair.

There's other places I had wanted to include as well to visit and do things, maybe I could learn how to make it so the player can fly through rooms without floors one day, but I just didn't have the time free to search for methods to do that.  I had wanted to do a lot more art and make another song or two as well, though that would have also been a bit more work searching for how to do things Inform 7 was never intended for to begin with, heck!  

Unfortunately I also didn't have the time to make anything very horny in my game, though I might like to do that for a later version.  At least that's something I could work on when not so pressed for time making and releasing a game for the first time, heck it was a bit stressful but I got through it!

My game was inspired by Glean (a mining-focused game) and Fossil Fighters (a dinosaur battling game), and I wanted to incorporate as many mechanics from these games as possible.

As my combat system is a 3v3 battle with elemental attrbutes for attacks and dinosaurs, I originally intended to add the option to swap the formation of each dino to allow the player to adapt to whatever formation the AI had adopted. But my code wasn't robust enough for that, and I ended up scrapping the whole, thing, making the combat a bit more shallow and unbalanced than I wanted to.

As for the mining/exploration, the original Glean had a bit more mechanics and mineable tiles implemented to make the experience less one-note, like gas clusters trapped in stone that would explore if you mined it too reckmlessly, and recipes you needed to unlock to progress deeper in the mine. I managed to implement some upgrades, but some items and tiles I wanted to mine would take too long, so I scrapped the idea.

Also, I couldn't make my game very horny. I originally planned to make small pixel art animations of the main girl fucking the dinos, but once I realized how long it would take me just for the default idle animation, I gave up and relegated the sex scenes to simple lines of text.

This was one heck of a month. I barely made a functional match-3 at all; I left out all the systems that would have attached to it. You were to have an opponent you would take turns making matches with, until one of you proved victorious. There was also supposed to be a system for triggering special effects when matching multiple colors simultaneously, a way to get a finite number of extra turns for matching 4 and 5, an entire skill system, interfacing with which being one of the piece's entire reason for being . . . heck, all of the pieces are just recolors of the Godot logo right now. I couldn't even get them distinct silhouettes in time!

i decided to try an experimental game design technique where you do as little as possible the whole month and then panic dev at the last minute, so there's a lot left out that I wanted to make better...

my original idea was that you could pick from several folks to DM, but just doing one proved so complicated that we barely had time to finish that, let alone get to the others

deadline pusher, didn't get to fullscreen. i was trying to get some music in for the intro but only got enough sequenced to sound like a scene in an operating room, which adds a strange, unintended feel that's going to pall any intended presentation for sure :D

The original concept we were working on got scrapped like a day before deadline because of complications realizing some of the game's mechanics.

This scrapping includes a ton of background scenes, UI, and CGs I worked really hard to finish before the deadline.

We pivoted to a backup idea one of our team members was working on for fun, meaning quite a few of us had like roughly 11 hours to make something substantial for the month long jam submission, on a prototype that one of our team had started working on halfway through February.

Looking at the positive, I had a great time and am proud to have shipped something with everyone, learned a lot about playing into team members strengths and finding ways to encourage development.

* SO * much!

Originally my game was intended to be twice as long ~ 30 mins rather than 10 to 15 mins! 

I wanted to do spicy ending cards for each ending, and some more explicit sex scenes, but the challenge of doing them for each possible weight in a weight gain game was way too much in the time. I also wanted to add a few more clues hinting at backstory & some goofy stuff (Like a cat that would appear in random places around the game!)

Also theres no sound in my game, buthonestly that was an if I get time thing so Im not suprised that didnt happen (Although in hindsight I should have popped in some free music so there was something at least!)

Despite all that Im pleased with what I managed as a solo dev/artist in the time :) 

I thought about making a sokoban game, couldn't figure out how to do tile based mechanics in clickteam fusion after playing with it for a bit, and then made a scary maze game instead

I got all the content I planned in, but in hindsight I wish I hadn't - there were some quality-of-life features (like slots glowing to show where cards can be placed, and choosing the gender of the NPC) that I didn't end up finishing as a result.

Miraculously, I managed to achieve everything I had in my mind when I was making notes at the start, but then after it took me 6 hours to set 1 puzzle, I realised it was stupid to aim for 15 or 30 lol. Even easy puzzles are hard to set. There is still a bunch of programmer art floating around too, but most of the important stuff got proper art, it’s only like icons and UI elements that didn’t get the fancy art pass.

My game is meant to be a long-term project, so I reduced my ambitions to a more manageable size for the jam. Peeping events are the big thing that's missing. When companions leave the party, they're meant to appear in a hidden spot on the map and players would be able to find them and see what they have decided to do after getting stripped. Within the scope of what I planned to get done, that's really the only thing I was sure I'd be able to include but didn't have time for. However, I didn't expect to get equipment changes added either, but I managed to code and make most of the necessary assets in the final two hours before the deadline! (And as expected, equipment is the thing associated with most bugs right now.)

Most of the stuff I made but didn't end up using are textures, but I also have a big design document that's describing a rather different turn-based game than what I ended up creating. It involved dice pairing to actions for added effects, stat contests to get through enemy defenses, and an elemental damage system. Some of these features will probably make their way back into the game in some form, but a lot of them will just never get used because I decided to work with what the game was becoming rather than my original vision and intent.

A lot of our graphic designer's work unfortunately didn't make it into the current version including the big WARNING screen on boss approach, and indicators when enemies were approaching from behind or the sides. The level 2 song was written but not recorded in time so it plays level 1's song again. The intro was going to transition from the backstory with the slow theme into a more intense cutscene that plays with the main theme, but the art wasn't finished for that so the main theme just plays near the end of the backstory. There was going to be a powerup called BRACE Mode: The ship's wings would be bound up, the player would become invulnerable and grazes would delete bullets, allowing you to build up the Impact Drive risk-free while also clearing the screen. The ship was planned to have a voice done via vocaloid, and just say things like "checkpoint, impact ready, warning" during the course of a mission.  And finally, there was more lore, but I like keeping the dialogue short and sweet.

There were some things that I already knew weren't going to make it in when we started, and that's scoring and a TLB. Scoring is kind of a big part of shmups for serious players, but I've never been that good so I've never studied what makes a good scoring system. I am planning to add a true last boss to game that will reveal additional lore, but as usual it  will require playing start to finish without using a continue. 

Originally, I wanted 5 games in the my collection. But sadly Dog Sitting as well as My Body Is a Garden proved to eat up to much time. So Milking and had gotten cut 😔🤝