Scope & Cut Content

When ideating for a game, sometimes it can be difficult to come up with interesting and compelling ideas and mechanics, while other times they can come easily. In some instances, you’ll have so many ideas that, inevitably, some of them won’t make it into the finished product. Sometimes, these ideas don’t make it in because they don’t match the direction the game ends up going in. Other times, it is because they would take too long to implement. Today we’ll be talking about the latter scenario and some of the sacrifices that must be made during game development. 

You might be surprised to find out that despite there only being one level in the finished game, each developer on the team initially came up with ideas for different levels and the interactions that would take place in them. This wasn’t because we thought we could fit over ten levels into the game, but instead because we wanted to find one or a few levels that we felt would best match our intended experience. Additionally, we went through a similar process for coming up with catastrophes, our map-wide disasters. 

Early Level Ideas

Speaking of catastrophes, we had originally intended for there to be a system that would allow people outside of the “primary” players to vote on which catastrophes would occur via their phones, like how a lot of Jackbox games handle the “audience,” rather than catastrophes being randomly selected. However, at the halfway point of the project, we recognized that it was unlikely that we would have enough time to fully implement such a system. Rather than try to cram it at the last minute and risk having game breaking bugs that might be exacerbated by an event like Stout Game Expo, we decided it would be best to invest that time instead into polishing the rest of the game. 

Mockup for Audience Voting on Phones

We also had plans to implement power ups, which met a similar fate. We realized that the purpose of power ups in the game overlapped mechanically with catastrophes.  Upon this realization, we ultimately decided that it would be better to invest in making catastrophes fun and impactful instead of having both catastrophes and power ups half-baked. 

Cutting content and reducing scope is often one of the most difficult parts of game development. It can be hard, envisioning an ideal world where your game has all the time and budget in the world, to let an idea go, but it’s usually for the better of the game, and the mental and physical health of the developers. If developers never cut content, games would take much longer, and cost much more to develop. It is thanks to the cuts that we have made that Buggy Bogey will be finished and ready to play at this spring's Stout Game Expo. 

Carter