TBA Pt. 8: Time-Butchered Assets

There’s always gonna be what-ifs in a jam game where time is key, especially one where you’re almost constantly behind. I had to cut a lot of corners to even warrant a last-second finished product!

Game Without A Name

This game didn’t even have a name for ¾ of the jam period! Me and taking way too long to come up with names, I swear. When I first conceptualized the plot on day 0 of the jam, my working title was Harold: Double Date. This quickly died when I remembered Fred and Eliza were siblings and this title would hint at incest. It was pretty much nameless for weeks after that, and I almost resorted to my joke name Stuck on an Island. Once I reworked the plot to feature Teebeyae, the game got its current name. I don’t know if it 100% fits but that’s barely an issue.

Shallow Moai Island

I originally named the island Shallow Moai Island as a nod to Shadow Moses Island, but I quickly scrapped this. Before I did, however, I had the idea for Moai guardians that would look around and initiate a battle if noticed. These became the Tikis inside the cave, which I changed to have an enemy that could be Burned.

That Ship Has Sailed

The intro cutscene was originally going to show a boat slowly moving upward, and said boat would stop at the dock once the game began. It was even going to be a timed sequence with automatically scrolling text and a score just long enough to match and lead into the main island theme. I put off the boat sprite for days, and I eventually decided it wouldn’t make a big difference on the game. Just plain water in the intro would have been an eyesore, so I pulled out my DSi and whipped up some art!

Codec Conversations

An idea I was a fan of but quickly scrapped due to scope was the ability to call David on your Codec from the menu! David would give you hints about what to do if you got stuck or lost. If you were to use the Codec in his shack, it would interrupt his call with Colonel and make Colonel think David died! I also had an option to heal from the menu, but I scrapped it in favor of healing after each fight save the Decoy.

David’s Dialogue Dilemma

I had zero confidence writing David’s dialogue at first and asked RPG Beta Testers if anyone wanted to proofread it and make suggestions. Frown stepped up to bat and revised this first draft that I wrote. Far cry from what Frown turned it into!

Enemies Healing

I mentioned in Gameplay that enemies could heal, which essentially meant removing one or all of their states. I wanted to do this to spice up gameplay a tad, but when NatePlays95 tested an early build he had a hell of a time trying to kill the Crab as it spammed healing moves any chance it got! I almost changed how often enemies healed, but it seemed like such a disservice to the core gameplay that I removed it entirely.

ArtosSans Condensed

One of my biggest time wasters of this whole jam was attempting to manually compress the font I used for dialogue by hand. ArtosSans was starting to get unwieldy in menus, so I squished each letter to be six pixels wide (or 18 when upscaled) instead of eight. I ultimately ended up not using it in favor of 4x8mono, but how did it turn out?

The Ending After The Ending

Huge spoiler warning if you haven’t played the game yet, but if you’re reading this then I imagine you have.

As we know, the game ends with David managing to sneak into the cave and detonate sticky bombs he placed on Fred and Eliza. It kinda ends on a “to be continued” kind of note, but there were plans for an ending cutscene afterward! I just had to cut it out of the picture and end on the dynamic note we got due to obvious time constraints.

After Fred and Eliza explode, it would zoom out to the entire island and show them flying out of the cave and into the ocean. Harold, Marsha, and David would then get a little moment together as they reminisce on their times as heroes. They’d all head back to David’s shack afterwards, implying the three now live together. There was even going to be a proper ending and credits theme! Imagine the Meta Knight’s Revenge ending theme but 8-bit and Theme6. I may work this ending into the Definitive Edition!

Tonight, voting for Harold Jam 2024 ends and the results will be revealed, bringing the jam to a hopefully satisfying conclusion. We’ll be ending Teebeyae’s Backstage Adventures with the Postmortem: To Bigger Adventures, where we’ll take a look at how H&TCoT placed and where to go for the future!