The Graveyard of Forgotten Features

paulpaterson on 2015/08/16 22:21

I'm sure we all had a slew of great features that we really wanted to implement but they never made it into our games because of time or other issues.

I always feel a sort of attachment to these fledglings that never had a real chance at life. So I thought I'd make a thread where these poor features can at least live on in our imaginations even if they never got to live through the code!

What are your top features that never got to see the light of day?

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Comments

paulpaterson on 2015/08/16 22:21:

For "Godel" here are my favourites

  1. The pump, the pump ... there was supposed to be a pump. You were supposed to see a pump that was pumping the water from the vessel to the different people's containers. Did you wonder why there was a blank space at the bottom left of the screen? Yep, the pump was supposed to be there. It was going to turn and lights were going to flash. It was going to lock in the feeling of operating a functional machine.

    But I never found any good clip art and I couldn't visualize it and I was running out of time and that darned dialog bug cost me way too much ... argh.

    There was supposed to be a pump!
     
  2. Dynamic graphs.There were going to be graphs and charts updating in real time. You were going to be able to watch the characters health and water drop as the clock ticked on.

    But I recognized after 3 days that I was short on time and needed to find a way to advance the story. I saw that using fixed charts would sort of allow me to solve a bit of both.

    Although these were a regret, I realise that I never had a realistic chance of getting them in, so they are more of a pipe dream ... or maybe a v2 feature!
     
  3. Richer interctions with the other characters. This is the big regret and probably only needed a couple of hours to write. The conversation engine supports these. People can react to facts, ie dialog can be enabled or disabled in certain circumstances based on what has happened. So in theory all I needed to do was write dialog, eg responding to people dying or running out of water or being more healthy than the rest of the group.

    But it's never that simple. I found dialog testing very time consuming and so just a few hours of writing dialog would have been at least as much testing edge cases.

    But this would have been a good one to get in.
     

iminurnamez on 2015/08/17 20:32:

Skipping the graphs was probably a good idea, mine were a huge timesuck and still have issues. I originally wanted to have everything happening on one screen with multiple small draggable dynamic graphs you could open and close, but it didn't work out very well so I gave up so I could get working on the stock market. The feature I wish had made it, though, is the ability to take over a company by buying up a controlling stake. Essentially, the player would take the place of the company's Management object and be responsible for the investment decisions each quarter. There's no way I would have had time for it, but it would have been a big improvement.

paulpaterson on 2015/08/18 02:37:

That sounds like it would have been a cool addition. Once the competition and voting are done it would be good to go back and implement things like that, although I must be honest that for previous pyweek's I didn't really feel like adding too much!