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) :)