What kind of things were inevitably cut to keep the scope small? Is there anything too ambitious to include that you really wanted to put in?
There is a similar ask to this one so im going to read this specifically as "Ideas that were cut later in production"
Honestly not that many! There were a few little things like having the idea to make the graphics all pre-rendered but I really wanted have a game filled with my drawing that I know how to do rather than 3d stuff im not as experienced with for the sake of both time and showing off my skillz.
I wanted to make a game in this menu based format with encounter tables for a while and one of those ideas that I ended up scrapping because I couldn't figure it out easily enough is having the encounter table display like you're rolling a mario party minigame, BUT you would have a resource to nudge it up or down (I was thinking this would be a kind of luck resource). basically i didn't know how to easily display the wheel of events so i scrapped it pretty quickly. but i still want to play with the idea of an encounter table that has things beyond its usual upper and lower bounds where the super high region has a super bad thing but the super low region has a super good thing. given the way encounters are all events that you have to engage in rather than simply things that happen to you I don't think this is something i could fit into the game now but maybe in another game.
right now i could probably make it possible to shift the rate of combat to non combat encounters but i just have that as a random event.
Looks like i wrote down "random partner events" I think I wanted these to be random lil scenes that happen in the place of a random day effect but there's already so much writing in here that it's definitely not something I'm going to plan the game around. I think I was also against it because I didn't want "Missable story bits" but this game is built around being played through multiple times so that's kind of a fake problem, actually.
I also had an idea for there being events that happened regularly that would essentially have you make a choice to trade stats up or down but I think I just straight up did not have any ideas for what those would be so I just didn't bother. Makes more sense for stats to always go up considering the in game time limit being as small as it is.