Snicker snack! IF material you've put to the sword

Authoring General Design Discussions
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What’s some IF content you’ve tenderly crafted that you just had to cut for the good of the final game? This could be plot ideas you heavily developed, characters you adored writing, cool scenes, badass one-liners… or anything else that would have probably made the game a lot worse, but still hurt you to discard when you realized they had to go.

For myself, I had this whole idea in my head for Andromeda Chained where Ketos (the monster that is prophesied to eat Andromeda in the Greek myth before being killed by Perseus) comes to Andromeda in a flashback before being slain and discusses how Andromeda, her mother Cassiopeia, and Ketos are all feminine entities subject to the prophesies and whims of men, with no true agency to affect the events of their lives. Thought it was potentially really tragically thematic, but more likely kinda corny and anvilicious, and I didn’t know if I could pull it off well. So I didn’t!

So how about yall? What darling of yours was most difficult to kill? Why did you kill them? Give me samples and snippets if you can! I wish to read the juicy might-have-beens :eyes:

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I Am Prey originally had an easter egg where if the Predator checks in on you and you’re still in the Delivery Room, he’s like “Uh… Do you not know how this works? You’re supposed to run. Look, uh… I’ll give you another chance. Just don’t mess it up, this time…”

And then he wanders off and gives you a number of turns without aggression. If he finds you again during this period of peace, he’s like “You should really be running. Tick tock…”

This was in the game all the way up until an hour before the SpringThing deadline. I was on a call with a tester, and we were doing some last-minute live bugfixes. This peaceful state had a lot of weird problems and exploits, so I just removed it from the game right before submission.

I’d love to figure out what went wrong, and add it to the post-comp version. A lot of work went into it, but I just didn’t have the time to fix it before the deadline.

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My design philosophy for RTE was maximalist, so not much

However, early versions had more annotation sources, most notably the thief from Zork. I was a little sad to see him go.

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I very rarely cut things from my games, though the NeoTwiny Jam has a hard limit of 500 words of prose. My entry’s not going to be released until June, (when submissions open), but for context, it’s about the player character’s romance with a devil. It was really heavily inspired by the storylets in Fallen London, where you can choose to romance an Affectionate Devil or the Quiet Deviless, and the former of which is one of my favourite NPCs in the entire game. He’s so endearingly earnest.

I was going to include another tie in to one of my favourite pieces of lore from the game, where the devils go on this Grand Hunt where they scamper after humans wearing masks and prancing about on ponies, (they canonically eat people at the Dante’s grill/diner, so hunting them for sport isn’t like, unusual for them), because you can get invited to participate as a Dangerous challenge, but had to slice it out for brevity’s sake.

I’ve been pondering taking it and expanding it into a larger work because I’m really in love with the concept, but here’s the line that I excised and set aside in my Scrivener in case I do return to it:

Hope sparkles in his eyes, scintillating like the diamond brooch securing his hunting cloak.

”I did hope you would come,” he says.

The piece itself (idle hands, which is literally just waiting for me to hit the launch live page button on itchio) wound up mostly being a piece focused on a single physical encounter with said devil. I’m still pretty happy with it, and a few people I’ve shared the WIP with have liked it, so fingers crossed.

It was also kind of interesting seeing how skirting around the mechanics of it all let me write for a gender neutral reader, which is kind of unusual, given the context of the piece, I think.

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Let’s see… five planned endings, a secret area, the modular forgetfulness option (using an item to forget the notion of an existence within the game to bypass some puzzles) an immense amount of unimplemented dialogue and observatory snippets from the followers npc and real-time AI image generation for (probably) the ending slides… Stygian Dreams had a pre-work time of three months against the two week development time so… yeah. Hoping to resurrect the dead bits and sew them back on for a proper release soon…ish.

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I cut so much random stuff from Houghtonbridge (testers might remember the mysteriously appearing kitchen fridge as one example) that I have enough to make a whole other game out of it sometime.

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I’d be interested to see this – either stitched back in or in another release entirely.

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Duly noted! The main issue with that mechanic, as i’ll mention in the (eventual) postmortem, was the intended implementation. Forgetting the custom action in its entirety can very well break components that its connected to, drastically increasing the complexity of the plotline.

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