After coming up with plenty of ideas for doohickeys and whatsits to include, I actually ended up with an accidental red herring: an object with no use. Except the perfect role for it came to me when I should have been sleeping!
My plan was to try and quickly implement this behaviour before work, but instead I ran into a series of bugs and spent my time fixing them: actions that could be performed twice, items that could be removed from their correct positions, flags triggered at the wrong time…
It’s a kind of progress, I guess, but it doesn’t fill me with confidence for how polished this game can be by the final deadline!