(Almost) Cut Content

On the Cutting Room Floor

It is a simple truth for all games that there will be features, ideas, or content that just can’t be fit into the game for any number of reasons. One such example for Woebegone Woods is the character Barley, your and my favorite badger who’s just happy to be where people listen to his stories. You may be thinking “But Barley is still in the game, he wasn’t cut at all!” And you would be correct. But he was very nearly removed from the game.

Too Much Too Fast

We knew for a long time that we would need to write a lot of dialogue for the game to accommodate each possible pair of characters, and with 6 characters and each pair having a growing friendship that needed to be written and several more interactions to fill the space between each stage in their friendship, in the end it resulted in just under 200 unique dialogue interactions. However, that number used to be much larger.

From the Ashes

Originally, the plan was to have a set of unique dialogue for each character pairing per year in the game. And with 3 “years” in-game that would mean writing almost triple the amount that we did. And with that massive number, the only thing we could do to reduce it was to remove a character and cut down on the number of pairings possible. But after some confusion and discussion, we came to the conclusion that having unique sets of dialogue per pairing per year was just too much, and so we decided to to have only one set of the intermittent dialogues that can be played across all 3 years in-game. Since that scraped away at the mountain of writing, we thought about what would happen if we brought Barley back into the picture. Once the math was done and the dust settled, the amount of writing came down to still be far less than what we would have had for the previous yearly-based sets of dialogue if we added Barley into the new set. So we decided to bring him back in to round out the cast even more and have another voice in the game.

But That’s Not All

Unfortunately, not everything we wanted to put in the game can make it into the final build. One feature we have been pushing for since the beginning of the project is a journal for the player to keep tabs on everyone in the woods. If you remember from the previous blog post, Bean’s desk had a journal for task assignment. But that’s not all that it would be used for. The player would be able to take a look at it at any time to view a quick overview of each character that would update based on the things that character did during the game. For example, the player would know which task they were assigned to the most, who they are the best friends with, and how happy they’re feeling, as well as a short biography that would be revealed over time as Bean became better friends with them. But also the journal would provide useful information regarding more detailed breakdown of how much progress is made each day of the festival. And something minor that had to be cut as a part of the journal was small collectibles that would be displayed in the journal for meeting certain conditions such as a threshold of progress toward the festival or reaching the max amount of friendship between the different pairings of characters.

The journal from Bean’s office for task assignment.

Not All Endings Are Happy

And while we were able to work out a solution for Barley to make the cut, the journal just isn’t something we could make work with the time we have. It requires too much work from every area of development (art and UI for the visuals, design for how and when information is shown in the journal, writing and narrative design for what is shown, sound for interacting with the journal, and programming to put it all together). Since the journal isn’t essential for the complete primary experience of the game we sadly had to put it on the shelf where it will have to stay.