Cutting Floor

I'm a very wasteful dev. I tend to make all sorts of things I inevitably decide not to keep. These things get filed away for some other time, and it's not just once in a while, I tend to cut probably half of the things I make. I thought today might be an interesting time to tell you about some of the things that were almost in the main title that might show up somewhere else and kind of give perspective on how much the game has changed since originally writing it down.

When I first started the game was going to be centered around a player that accidentally wandered in to a criminal based deathmatch game in a city that'd been converted to a play field. There was a floating camera that followed the player around recording what you did, allowing you access to 3rd person mode, and would allow friends to watch you play from a spectator view. There were tools to hack street cameras and manipulate city defenses. There were vehicles you could grab off the street and drive around, and if you came to a sudden stop you would sometimes go flying out the windshield, which could be an intentional option to chase an enemy getting away through a narrow pass between streets. In the end it all got cut and the story re-written. I use the excuse that all the metal was taken by the survivors to build their walls. Though I'm still considering adding back 3rd person under a different pretense.

Now there's one thing that I had put in that I'm considering cutting though I've already gotten it mostly finished which makes me think I might just leave it in for the same reason it was there to begin with. I have a multiple choice answer system where by pressing triggers or the shoulder buttons, aka L1/2 R1/2 etc to shift perspective selection options. By pressing none you get the neutral response options. Essentially you'd be using one set for lawful/chaotic and the other for good/evil and by not selecting a set you get the neutral of the unselected. Your answers basically don't effect anything, sometimes a slightly different response and the idea was to add an achievement to point out the pointlessness of having the choice considering it would end with the same net result. I'd also point out that is a lot of dialog to come up with. So far it's safe though it depends on how many complaints I get. It would seem people want these choices to mean something which is in direct opposition to their entire purpose. I'm probably just going to leave it in out of spite.

Then there's the recently removed giant mechs. Literally as tall as some of the tallest skyscrapers in the game these giant mechs dominated the field and were designed to help players focus on team work to brink the behemoths down. Turns out that it's much more difficult to get people to work together on a single target than I'd originally imagined. This includes even when I made them the primary objective for all players. Even weakening them to absurdly easy didn't really seem to help get people to work together so I've since been trying to find other ways to do so. Including forcing players to stick together, and punishing them even more than before for not doing so.

There are a lot of other things on the cutting room floor, this is just a highlight of some of the things I worked fairly hard on that simply aren't in the game anymore.

Not to make up for anything here but I also added a new grenade. When it explodes all of it's fragments also explode on impact, great for clearing a room or taking down a small building. It can be combined with some of the splitting skills so the fragments split apart again after the secondary explosion to make 3rd and 4th explosions wile also doubling the number of fragments or more. It also ties in with any and all other skills because I had enough forethought in the framework to make future weapons as dlc options as well, most likely free of course. This means throwing 2 or more of them at the same time, bigger explosions, more damage, further throwing distance than the base value, additional properties like poison gas, invisibility texture application, flashbang properties, explode on impact, and ever so many other options. There's an entire tree of options dedicated to ranged weaponry, as well as explosives, which together tend to combine well with grenades or under barrel launchers, or RPG's etc. Hopefully you'll like it, I certainly do.