Brainstorming is a large part of a videogame's initial design, helping the developers to come up with ideas and concepts to implement. There's lots of directions that a game can take its gameplay in; an adventure game might have a cave or dungeon focused on battling enemies, quick reflexes and strategy, or have a cave or dungeon focused on solving puzzles, critical thinking and logic. Even within these two basic types, there is a variety of ways to create them. The amount of content that one can think up for a game is enormous, limited only by – of course – your imagination.
Where this becomes relevant, however, is when the game goes into a more solid phase of development, when ideas dreamed up start being crafted and added into the alpha build, then the beta build, and so on and so forth until it can be called a completed product. A person's imagination is limitless, but an actual game isn't: not every idea that a developer thinks up can be added, no matter how good of an idea it might seem like at the moment (or how bad of an idea it might be in retrospect). Thus, keeping in mind what should go on the chopping block when the time comes is important.
This isn't to say that a game will imminently, unquestionably have to have content cut from it. However, a game that has no content cut from it runs the risk of becoming bloated, so chock-full of concepts that trying to dole them out at a reasonable pace ends up hurting the overall experience. And vice-versa, when a deadline is fast approaching and content has to be cut to get the game ready in time, it runs the risk of having the game feel barren or even tedious. And both situations can make the game seem rushed, either because there's so many concepts that they all lacks depth, or because there's so little content that it comes off as being shoved out the door for a release date.
A prime example of cutting too much content can be found in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, specifically the infamous and oft-criticized hunt for the pieces of the Triforce.
Wind Waker contains five proper dungeons (not counting the Forsaken Fortress or the final, mini-dungeon), the least amount of dungeons in any Zelda game to date. The reason for this is because of the time constraints on the game's development. Two or three entire dungeons had to be cut from the game in order to have it ready for its release date, and the gap that this cut made was filled in by the Triforce charts, a large ocean-wide fetch quest which involved finding the charts themselves, having to pay to have each one individually deciphered, and then following the chart to wherever it led to. Due to the tedium of the entire sequence, it felt like filler to many players when the game was originally released, and it was one of the parts of the game that was tweaked in the WiiU re-release.
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With having to find each chart first, then having it deciphered before finally going for the shard it marks, that's a lot of sailing.
What is perhaps most obvious about it nowadays is how out of place it is in comparison to the rest of the game. While it does fit with the exploration that Zelda games try to encourage in players, it's so long, and so repetitive, that it quickly becomes boring, and soon afterward, grating. Instead of the frustration that can come with a particularly confusing puzzle, the Triforce hunt is frustrating in the way of being an impediment.
On the flipside, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is a particularly interesting example of when a game tries to pack too much content into itself and suffers for it as a result.
The original pair of Golden Sun games were very similar despite starring different playable teams and such – the maximum party size was four, the teams could gain a contingent of class-boosting Djinn for each character, so on and so forth. The second game of the duo only allowed both teams to combine very late in the game, and if both teams had all of the class-boosting critters they could find, it allowed for lots of experimentation for what combinations of critters, characters and classes worked for each player's preferred playstyle. Alongside the various weapons and other things that could be brought over from the first game to the second, it made for a huge amount of content between the two.
Dark Dawn, however, was a single game with no second “part”, and attempted to cram a similar amount of content into the game card. Eight characters, enough Djinn for all of them, so on and so forth. The problem stemmed from the fact that the amount of items and critters to collect made the game far, far easier than its predecessors. The higher amount of critters meant that you would have more of them and sooner, leading to gaining stronger spells and stats sooner as well, spells and stats that, in the original games, were designed to be available later.
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Powerful summons like Judgement weren't available until more than halfway through in the first game, and the Djinn needed for them would cause a character's stats to drop significantly.
Not only that, but there was so much packed into Dark Dawn that some other aspects from its predecessors still didn't make a return appearance. Some of these were small disappearances, like a gambling minigame, or a fountain game involving collectible lucky medals, but others, like easier and harder difficulty modes, had a much larger impact on replayability; indeed, given the ease and speed that players can get stronger in Dark Dawn, the inclusion of difficulty modes could have helped balance things out.
However, when a game's development focuses on the core elements first and then has to make cuts later, it often fares better than most thanks to having a solid amount of content to play already. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – the Genesis game, not the one for the Game Gear – is a game that thankfully was created with this sort of mindset.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is famous, especially in ROMhacking circles, for the large handful of zones that were scrapped during development, some of which were concepts dropped during the brainstorming phase, while others have code and even graphics tucked away in the game's cartridge. The most well-known of these is the Hidden Palace zone, which later was reworked and added as a secret level in the game's iOS remake.
Beyond this, there was also the Cyber City zone, Wood zone, and Dust Hill, Rock and Winter zones, the former two being accessible in a prototype build (though both are fairly unfinished) and the latter three being scrapped much earlier. The game was also initially going to include time travel between zones, with Rock Zone being the past version of Dust Hill Zone.
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Wood Zone is still playable on ROMs of certain Beta builds of the game, though it's highly unfinished, dooming you to a bottomless pit after about ten seconds in.
The reason that these cuts are more understandable – and less damaging – than the cuts, or lack of cuts, from the other two examples, is because Sonic 2's final release contains ten whole zones already, not including the Death Egg, which only houses the final bosses. While it would have been nice to have these other levels finished and added (though perhaps two to five more zones would have caused the game to drag on), the amount of content already included is still quite a lot. Their removal doesn't hurt the game's experience in any way.
With all this said, here are some things to keep in mind when developing a game and having content come into play.
Where this becomes relevant, however, is when the game goes into a more solid phase of development, when ideas dreamed up start being crafted and added into the alpha build, then the beta build, and so on and so forth until it can be called a completed product. A person's imagination is limitless, but an actual game isn't: not every idea that a developer thinks up can be added, no matter how good of an idea it might seem like at the moment (or how bad of an idea it might be in retrospect). Thus, keeping in mind what should go on the chopping block when the time comes is important.
This isn't to say that a game will imminently, unquestionably have to have content cut from it. However, a game that has no content cut from it runs the risk of becoming bloated, so chock-full of concepts that trying to dole them out at a reasonable pace ends up hurting the overall experience. And vice-versa, when a deadline is fast approaching and content has to be cut to get the game ready in time, it runs the risk of having the game feel barren or even tedious. And both situations can make the game seem rushed, either because there's so many concepts that they all lacks depth, or because there's so little content that it comes off as being shoved out the door for a release date.
A prime example of cutting too much content can be found in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, specifically the infamous and oft-criticized hunt for the pieces of the Triforce.
Wind Waker contains five proper dungeons (not counting the Forsaken Fortress or the final, mini-dungeon), the least amount of dungeons in any Zelda game to date. The reason for this is because of the time constraints on the game's development. Two or three entire dungeons had to be cut from the game in order to have it ready for its release date, and the gap that this cut made was filled in by the Triforce charts, a large ocean-wide fetch quest which involved finding the charts themselves, having to pay to have each one individually deciphered, and then following the chart to wherever it led to. Due to the tedium of the entire sequence, it felt like filler to many players when the game was originally released, and it was one of the parts of the game that was tweaked in the WiiU re-release.
With having to find each chart first, then having it deciphered before finally going for the shard it marks, that's a lot of sailing.
What is perhaps most obvious about it nowadays is how out of place it is in comparison to the rest of the game. While it does fit with the exploration that Zelda games try to encourage in players, it's so long, and so repetitive, that it quickly becomes boring, and soon afterward, grating. Instead of the frustration that can come with a particularly confusing puzzle, the Triforce hunt is frustrating in the way of being an impediment.
On the flipside, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is a particularly interesting example of when a game tries to pack too much content into itself and suffers for it as a result.
The original pair of Golden Sun games were very similar despite starring different playable teams and such – the maximum party size was four, the teams could gain a contingent of class-boosting Djinn for each character, so on and so forth. The second game of the duo only allowed both teams to combine very late in the game, and if both teams had all of the class-boosting critters they could find, it allowed for lots of experimentation for what combinations of critters, characters and classes worked for each player's preferred playstyle. Alongside the various weapons and other things that could be brought over from the first game to the second, it made for a huge amount of content between the two.
Dark Dawn, however, was a single game with no second “part”, and attempted to cram a similar amount of content into the game card. Eight characters, enough Djinn for all of them, so on and so forth. The problem stemmed from the fact that the amount of items and critters to collect made the game far, far easier than its predecessors. The higher amount of critters meant that you would have more of them and sooner, leading to gaining stronger spells and stats sooner as well, spells and stats that, in the original games, were designed to be available later.
Powerful summons like Judgement weren't available until more than halfway through in the first game, and the Djinn needed for them would cause a character's stats to drop significantly.
Not only that, but there was so much packed into Dark Dawn that some other aspects from its predecessors still didn't make a return appearance. Some of these were small disappearances, like a gambling minigame, or a fountain game involving collectible lucky medals, but others, like easier and harder difficulty modes, had a much larger impact on replayability; indeed, given the ease and speed that players can get stronger in Dark Dawn, the inclusion of difficulty modes could have helped balance things out.
However, when a game's development focuses on the core elements first and then has to make cuts later, it often fares better than most thanks to having a solid amount of content to play already. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – the Genesis game, not the one for the Game Gear – is a game that thankfully was created with this sort of mindset.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is famous, especially in ROMhacking circles, for the large handful of zones that were scrapped during development, some of which were concepts dropped during the brainstorming phase, while others have code and even graphics tucked away in the game's cartridge. The most well-known of these is the Hidden Palace zone, which later was reworked and added as a secret level in the game's iOS remake.
Beyond this, there was also the Cyber City zone, Wood zone, and Dust Hill, Rock and Winter zones, the former two being accessible in a prototype build (though both are fairly unfinished) and the latter three being scrapped much earlier. The game was also initially going to include time travel between zones, with Rock Zone being the past version of Dust Hill Zone.
Wood Zone is still playable on ROMs of certain Beta builds of the game, though it's highly unfinished, dooming you to a bottomless pit after about ten seconds in.
The reason that these cuts are more understandable – and less damaging – than the cuts, or lack of cuts, from the other two examples, is because Sonic 2's final release contains ten whole zones already, not including the Death Egg, which only houses the final bosses. While it would have been nice to have these other levels finished and added (though perhaps two to five more zones would have caused the game to drag on), the amount of content already included is still quite a lot. Their removal doesn't hurt the game's experience in any way.
With all this said, here are some things to keep in mind when developing a game and having content come into play.
- When first starting development, prioritize the most central parts of it over others. If you want your game's main content to include about six dungeons, put getting those six dungeons designed, playtested, and finalized high on the list.
- When brainstorming concepts for your game, consider how much time you might have to work on it and tweak your ideas accordingly. Planning to try and make enormous amounts of content from scratch within, say, a single year, is nonsensical. The more time – and manpower, possibly – you have, the more you can get done. Think reasonably.
- If a situation comes up and content will have to be cut from your game, take the aforementioned prioritizing into account and look at what is truly important to the game's experience, and what can be cut with little harm. If there are parts of your game that lack both tangible content and don't have impact on any story there might be, then they may be prime targets for the chopping block.