Developers talk about features cut from games

The process of creating games is often associated with cutting off the excess.

On the set of polished finished products that have chosen the market, there are thousands of ideas that did not live to see it, or, over time, mutated so much that it was impossible to recognize their original appearance.

Gamasutra asked game developers to tell about the most memorable ideas that had to be cut out and the reasons for abandoning them.

Mitch Guitelman, Harebrained Schemes

Of course, a huge number of features falls into the abyss between ambition and practical feasibility. According to Mitch Guitleman, the gap was even greater when developers began selling their projects on crowdfunding platforms; he had never seen the scale of expectations ever increase.

“During our Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for Shadowrun Returns in 2012, Harebrained Schemes had to get a hard lesson on managing the scale of the project.”

“Initially, our goals related to the game were quite realistic, but after we had collected the necessary funds in just 28 hours, we had to raise the stakes. It was one of the very first video game projects on Kickstarter, so we could not explore previous experience. We were taken by surprise, so we improvised by inventing a series of additional goals, including the addition of a second city, if we collected a million dollars. The action of the original desktop RPG took place in Seattle in 2053, and we told the backers that if we could collect this amount, they would be able to vote for the choice of an additional city. ”

The promise to almost double the scale of the game is an ambitious plan, but fortunately for Harebrained fans, the short-term loss turned into a win in the long run.


“Let's move forward for a few months devoted to answering the question“ How are we going to make this game? ”: We realized that we would not be able to fulfill our promise in any way and had to cut the volume. However, we promised that after the release we would take the additional city that the Bekers had voted for and use it as the entourage of the full second campaign; besides, our backers will get this campaign for FREE, ”continues Githelmen.

“Although this cutback was painful, it resulted in the emergence of Shadowrun Dragonfall - a much larger and richer game world than just the second city in Shadowrun Returns . Dragonfall was a fantastic opportunity to take the Shadowrun Return promise and take our narrative abilities to a new level. Perhaps distributing forty thousand copies of the game to the backers was not the smartest business decision in the world, but it proved that we are a trustworthy studio and prepared us for future successes on Kickstarter, the culmination of which was the most ambitious project in the history of Harebrained Schemes - Battletech .

Brenda Romero, Romero Games

Sometimes you have to give up not just some kind of new mechanics or too ambitious system. Sometimes it is an absolutely unique character, a creation that every author would recognize as more alive and valuable than any sets of graphics and dialogues. Such a character Brenda Romero can not forget since her work in Sir-Tech.


“After we finished Wizardry 8 , I really missed some of the NPCs that weren’t in the release of the game. I spent so much time on their texts, improvement and testing, on life inside their heads, that I feel the rejection of them as the departure of a native child from home. I especially miss Rodan Lewarks, Sax and Balbrac (Rodan Lewarx, Saxx and Balbrak). I remember these characters even 20 years later, and this is about something, yes says. "

Ryan Huer, Little Red Dog Games

Another frequently occurring theme among lost ideas is the features that had to be cut out because of the cold, pragmatic lack of time or resources. Ryan Hewer ran into this while working on Deep Sixed .

“Initially, we planned that Deep Sixed would have much more extensive settings for the player, for example, in the form of an AI avatar that accompanies the entire game. We hoped that at some point in the story the player would select him from a set of pre-set personalities, each of whom has his own avatar and voice actor. Such a choice should not be superficial and influenced the gameplay. Each AI would react to procedurally generated situations individually - over time, the gameplay would start to vary greatly depending on the avatar chosen. But in the end, despite the desire of this mechanic, we have no resources left to re-record hundreds of lines of dialogue with additional actors. ”


This element of customization was not the only feature, which as a result had to be abandoned to simplify the development process.

“In addition, we hoped to open the insides of the game with the help of modding tools, so that players could create their own missions, import creature models, and develop their own story arches. But it also significantly increased development time, and we already postponed the release date. In the end, we are proud to be released. The developer must understand when it is necessary to abandon the idea, no matter how good it may be. This is a burden that burdens the development process. ”

Andrew Tres, Trese Brothers Games

The most interesting examples of emergent gameplay arise when you begin to mix procedural systems and watch for unpredictable results. Unfortunately, as Andrew Tres found out, sometimes such unintended interactions can completely destroy the game.

“In our RPG Star Traders: Frontiers in the space opera genre, we created a large-scale branching narrative based on plot characters scattered across an ever-changing galaxy,” says Tres.


“At the base of this system lay the character simulator, who controlled the relationships and conflicts between all the characters, sometimes even allowing them to kill each other. At the first connection of these two layers (plot and simulation), non-plot characters began to kill plot. The player could go through a long storyline arch and return from his native world, only to find out that the important plot character Zet Fen was killed by the Prince from a completely different part of the galaxy. It was almost sabotage - the simulation wanted to dominate and deliberately killed plot characters! As a result, in order to preserve the integrity of the storyline arches, we had to remove the ability to kill storylines from the simulated characters - at least while the storylines are acting! ”

Keith O'Connor, Romero Games

Sometimes painful clipping needs to be done when one of the team members is in a vacuum, without touching any other colleague working on other elements of the game. If the system is not integrated into the game as a whole, then there is a risk that it will be completely destroyed. Keith O'Connor learned this painful lesson while working with Radical Entertainment on the Prototype game.

“The designers wanted to create a feeling of“ foggy after the battle streets ”to reinforce the explosions and chaos that constantly arise in the game. I spent some time creating this effect. It has become quite beautiful, low-cost and well integrated with the particle effects system. ”

In the process of improving the game, O'Connor was looking for ways to optimize and improve performance, and made a sad discovery.


“Because of the fog effect, there was a waste of resources that took up CPU time, even when there was no fog on the screen. Therefore, I began to learn to understand.
what can be done about it. To my disappointment, I realized that the system is almost never used in the game. Artists lacked the tools, and the effect as a whole was too difficult to use, so more often it was not used. We were too close to release to have time to do something, so with a heavy heart, I completely cut out this function, receiving in return a fraction of a millisecond of CPU time. That day I received an important lesson about the need for good support tools and the importance of receiving feedback from artists about each visual effect from the very beginning of its development! ”

Carlos Carrasco, Weird & Wry

Of course, it also happens that an idea that looks damn interesting on paper turns out to be terrible when implemented.


“In our game, there was a huge meteor shower falling on a player’s space station with a small notification — usually it hit the most expensive and most frequently used area,” says Carlos Carrasco about his game Spatials: Galactology . “For a full minute, the rage of space in the form of burning exploding boulders rained down on a poor station. This feature was part of a beta release, in which random events were actively used. Who may not like the orbital bombardment of meteorites, occurring absolutely by accident? As it turned out, our players. "

Kyle Creamer, Trykon Studios

And there are also reliable and functional ideas that most of the development time correspond to the vision of development, but are cut out at later stages, because they are not combined with the final product. Kyle Creamer recalls an example of such an idea from the Omnicube - the concept of ice walls collapsing in a collision.

“It was a great way to create temporary“ one-off “walls,” Creamer says. “A player could use locks only once. This created a lot of difficulties, because in addition to the static parts of each level, the player had to figure out how to use ice walls to temporarily block positions. ”


In the end, the ice walls were removed from the game for two reasons - the scale of the project and aesthetics. Initially, we developed this feature when we wanted to create a separate graphic style for each level set; Each group of 15 levels should have its own theme (for example, “fire” or “ice”). However, later we decided to use the general theme in the game; This allowed us to reduce the cost of graphics and development. Therefore, the ice blocks no longer fit the game. I was sad to part with the ice walls, but as a result, this choice allowed us to finish and release the game, and this is the most important. "