Cut Content and Concept Art Showcase

Hi! Thought I'd talk a little about how development went and share stuff that didn't make it into the final game. I definitely went too ambitious for this project. The game changed a lot and I wish I could've planned better. 

It started with the vague idea of a collectathon with puzzle and platform challenges in a Mario 64 style level built around a hill with a crashed spaceship on top. Then it transitioned to having deeper RPG mechanics with an experimental battle system. I've always been fascinated by battle systems that experiment in between real-time and turn-based. But after I finished the script halfway through development, I found myself caring more about the story than anything else. It came out longer than I intended but I wasn't willing to cut it down. It became obvious a lot of other ideas and mechanics wouldn't fit into the 40 minutes. Only scraps of a collectahon and scraps of an RPG remain. So I thought I'd share a little here of what was worked on and some concepts that never made it.

1) AREAS

First, there's the bottom of the well:

You would've met a friendly blue-skinned green-eyed snurgluz down here. He would've introduced himself by saying "W-wait! I'm not a bad snurgluz!" a reference to the friendly slimes in Dragon Quest you sometimes meet in a dungeon or a well. I wanted to have some furniture down here too for the slime but never added it. Also considered putting a top hat on the slime. He would've been like a Dragon Quest mini medal collector. If you gave him emerald cogs, he would give you special prizes. Collecting all emerald cogs and turning them in would've resulted in the slime giving you the Jester Key to access the dilapidated circus from Galaxen City. An NPC standing next to the locked entrance to the circus would mention dropping the key in a well as a hint.

In the end I realized Kyle would not go looking for collectibles to unlock DSD in 40 minutes. I thought maybe the slime could just give you the key as a thank you for paying him a visit. But with the deadline coming up and the story being lengthy, I cut it all. There's no way to access the bottom of the well, the circus area was never made (it would've just been the tent and a ferris wheel on a tiny wharf), the tent was put in the back of the town and you can walk right in. I was also worried Kyle wouldn't find the well on stream and not get the jester key. It was hilarious to me when he went right for the well. 

2) OUTFITS + SHOP

Another cut was alternative outfits. Each character would've had two palette swap outfits. You would buy them with crystals at the shop. I thought it would be a fun situation to create on stream if there was only enough time to get one or two outfits and Kyle had to pick and ask chat what outfit they wanted to go for based only on the names at the shop. But the shop got cut so the outfits did to. Here are Charlene's outfits:

The classic adventure shirt was meant to be in line with protagonist outfits in Earthbound, Undertale, and Deltarune. It's the modern day kid on a jrpg adventure look. The heartbreaker shirt was just a design I came up with that I thought was cool and one of my best friends loves black and pink together. And here are Singuliera's outfits:

The red queen outfit was meant to look like the Akira jacket. I wanted a design on the back that was close to the pill capsule without straight-up being the same but never figured it out before it was obvious outfit swaps weren't going to make the deadline. You probably already guessed the yellow plaid outfit's reference. What better way to honor Steel Love starting in the 90s than one of the most iconic 90s movie outfits?

Averagmus's palette swaps were never made but they would've been a black poncho with a skull on the back called the 'Desperado Poncho', and a royal blue one with orange flames called the 'Blazing Justice Poncho'. Given all the clipping issues the poncho had, I realized different poncho color would be wasted on him and considered having outfits for only Charlene and Singuliera before scrapping the whole concept of outfits altogether. But these four exist and I can swap them out in the Unity editor even though they're not accessible in game.

One of the biggest cuts was the shop. I had trouble getting UI and menus going and building UI is very tedious. I started using UI Builder which is a new feature in Unity. But being so new means it has little documentation or tutorials. Some things I couldn't figure out at all like the progress bar to use for health meters. In the end, I gave up on UI Builder and just started making UI the usual way for Unity with gameobjects. I pretty much had to redo all the UI halfway through development and making menus was killing me so most stuff that required a menu got cut. But here's what the shop menu was looking like before cutting it:

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Menus were going to be sort of color coordinated. Main/Pause menu = pink, battle = blue, shop = purple. Pink + Sky Blue was the main color palette for UI I wanted to work with to match Charlene's colors. The lights in the shop are half pink and half blue for Charlene.

In addition to outfits, you would buy upgrades that boost stats and add passive skills like a 15% chance to evade enemy attacks. I also considered having actual equipment. I was going to make chips like Paper Mario badges where you can equip so many based on a capacity threshold with each chip taking up a different amount of capacity and you could increase your max capacity with upgrades.

Enemies were suppose to drop materials which you could use to craft chips. In the end none of this happened because of how much work and tedium is involved in making menus for this and creating UI to compare stats and show materials needed. So I spent a good chunk of dev time making a robust equipment and crafting system but it all went to waste because making the menus for it on a fast approaching deadline was giving me a headache. But equipment and crafting was coded and a lot of items exist in the files as scriptable objects. You can actually equip items on your character in the editor, but you can't access any of this in game.

3) ENEMIES

And of course there were suppose to be more enemies and more moves per enemy. In the final game, each enemy only uses one move. Enemies were meant to have a rotation of skills and do buffing and debuffing. Enemy inflicted status effects were cut because I was worried it wouldn't be clear to the player what status they were hit with without making more complex UI. As stated above, I was struggling with UI so that wasn't happening. Chromebeak was supposed to have a move that disables healing. Enemies were also supposed to have AOE attacks. As it is now with single-target attacks,iIf you're standing in the enemy's attack activation range when they start an attack, you'll still be hit if you move away like Final Fantasy 12. But AOEs were suppose to be like FF14 where there is an indicator on the floor that you can get out of to avoid the attack. I was not able to figure out decal shadergraphs in time to implement this.

There were four normal enemy types planned and each were suppose to have palette swaps. Snurgluz Scouts are the only enemies in the final game. Snurgluz Hunters would look the same but have beefier stats and an AOE. Snurgluz Tacticians would buff and heal other enemies. Snurgluz Grandmasters were more powerful tacticians. Snurgluz Assassins would explode into a puddle of poison that would stay on the field for a while when defeated. 

Other enemies were Orionoks. These were kind of important to the story. They're the aliens the Empire teamed up with and they shared their ether-based technology with the Empire to accelerate technological advancements. The rest of the world is suppose to be struggling and have technology on par with the 90s unless they've salvaged empire/alien tech from battlegrounds which people like Trik sell. Orionoks' main attack was a projectile that sapped EP from your characters. They came from the middle star in Orion's Belt that was revealed in the books to actually be a Dyson Sphere disguises as a star. I had some serious lore planned! The ether crystals to collect in the game are a result of orionok weaponry having an effect on the environment and the exhaust was creating ether veins in the earth - it was all rather complicated. 

Empire Robots and Behemoths were the last enemies. Behemoths were large quadrupeds obviously referencing the ones from Final Fantasy. The big dirt patch on the first hilltop level of the main field is where a behemoth would've been. A cyber behemoth was meant to be encountered as a mini boss in the crashed spaceship. It would've had a Vegeta scouter. The crash ship was going to be a more complicated zelda-like dungeon early on. The Mayor was also meant to be involved in the Chromebeak fight. He would've healed and buffed but I never made a model for him in time.

Lastly, in the design doc I wrote that the adds for the DSD fight would've been creepy puppet versions of all the Bruised Ego characters. I'm bummed I never had time for this. Would've loved to seen chat's reaction. Of course DSD bugged out anyways and people didn't even get to see the one returning character I did include on stream unfortunately. I hope people who played and didn't have DSD glitch out enjoyed seeing that character. 

4) QUARK MECHANICS

The biggest cut of the whole game was 'Quark's Orders'. There was supposed to be a menu where you could issue various assignments in battle to the three Quark drones. They would stop orbiting around Charlene and go do these other things. One was to make medicine. A charge bar would appear above the drone showing how close it was to making medicine. It would be like 5 second intervals. Other orders included doubling the party's attack power (which I gave to Singuliera in the end), slowing down enemy attack charges, and drawing enemy attention to a certain character. That way you could have Averagmus get all the aggro and Singuliera could get back attacks off. Back attacks didn't make it into the final version.

I also considered giving Quark stuff to do outside of battle for puzzle solving. I toyed with using him like the beetle in Skyward Sword but the idea got lost in the mix. Overall Quark was heavily underutilized which is the last thing you want for the character's 'cool new ability' but it just happened. Even story wise Quark was underused. After seeing how much personality other games gave to Damien's robot buddy, I quickly regretted not giving Quark personality or asking littlekittenbit for Quark portrait art. I never even had a design done for Quark until a day before the deadline. He was a nondescript silver ball the whole month. Definitely one of my biggest regrets for this game.

While I was happy with the script I came up with, there were a few things that I think could've been better in addition to Quark not having a personality. Chromebeak's death scene definitely needed tighter pacing, and the plan at the end to blow up the ship while tossing it into the sky is very silly and rushed. Also, the resistance fighter coming in and giving you the mission and handing you a way to unlock the door comes across as jarringly videogamey after everything had been so character-driven up to that point. 

5) ??? JOINS THE PARTY?!

Another idea I toyed with was a fourth party member. A grazaloid who would be a dedicated healer + buffer with only one DoT ability for offense was considered very early on. Toward the back half of development, I had a strong desire to make the character you meet for beating DSD the fourth member as a reward for fighting him. I think it would've been so cool and unexpected to have that character join the party and actually have a reason for canonically being in the Steel Love universe via DSD and their role in last year's winning canon game but there was just no time for a fourth party member on top of everything else that needed done. DSD himself barely made the cut. If I were to make a complete version after the judging ends, I would absolutely add that character as the fourth member. Would've been great to see chat's reaction to her joining if I could've actually pulled it all off in month.

Congrats to anyone who read all that and thank you very much. This jam was a great experience for learning 3D and Unity. Part of me does want to make a complete version with everything that was planned. I managed to include everything chvage, littlekittenbit, and ion made but feel awful some of it was so underused, especially the shop music and shopkeeper portrait art. On the other hand, I feel there's not much interest when the magic of the jam dies. On top of that, I'm exhausted with the project and I'm eager to move on to a new personal project. My take away is next year I'm either making a smaller game or joining a bigger team.

Anyway, enjoy some concept art! I'm not an artist at all but these are the original concept sketches I made to show littlekittenbit what I wanted the cast to look like. I thought some might get a kick out of seeing the evolution of my rough ideas to littlekittenbit's final art. (If you ever read this, littlekittenbit, again thank you so so so much):

Orionok Warrior: