In an interview with TechRaptor, lead developer Ryan Koons stated that the decision to make HuniePop a gameplay-centric title instead of a story-centric one like other dating sims didn't happen until months into development. The original intention was to make a traditional dating sim, only for Koons – who already had little interest in storytelling in video games – to overhaul the concept due to his growing ennui.
In the same interview, Koons stated that he deliberately sought to avoid many of the cliches associated with dating sims, particularly "the usual innocent waifu style character types." Consequently, the game's cast are based on people from his own life, and the writing is much more irreverent than other dating sims. In particular, Koons described deuteragonist Kyu Sugardust as a raunchy fictionalization of her voice actress, Jaclyn Aimee.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
• All of Naplock's attacks can be dodged or countered by jumping, with its snot bubble attack also missing Mario & Luigi entirely even if nothing is done. • Dark Mechawful's punch attack can be countered with Mario & Luigi's hammers, while its countdown attack is replaced by the same star attack used by the Dark Mechawful head, which can fight Mario & Luigi in normal gameplay if Bowser inhales it. However, in a hacked Dark Mechawful fight, this attack progresses extremely slowly. • The smoke signals at the start of Choomba's charge attack are changed from fist and shell icons to "M" and "L" ones, indicating which brothers it will charge at and in which order; the attack can also be countered by hammering. • Dark Trashure's thrown items can be avoided or countered by jumping, similarly to its standard counterpart. However, the items move far faster than those thrown by a regular Trashure or a Dark Trashure fought by Bowser.
While most of these behaviors appear to be failsafes, Choomba is unique in that the "M" and "L" smoke signals are not present anywhere else in the game, indicating that at one point in development, Mario & Luigi would've been able to explore the Tunnel, where Choombas are fought.
Meanwhile, when hacking the game to allow Bowser to fight enemies that can only be encountered by Mario & Luigi, most of them will either crash the game, flee immediately, or display glitchy behavior. One unique case is Magifoofas, which can be inhaled by Bowser (despite the Vacuum Block not indicating this), indicating that the developers considered letting him encounter them in some form.
In a 2020 interview with the YouTube channel Archipel, series producer Toshihiro Nagoshi claimed that the decision to change Yakuza: Like a Dragon from an action game to a turn-based RPG came from a 2019 April Fools' Day video for Yakuza Online showing turn-based combat which was received positively by fans. However, fans and news outlets seemed to take this statement seriously, and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's head Masayoshi Yokoyama later had to clarify that it was a joke. The decision to shift to turn-based combat was made before production on the game even began due to it being too drastic of a change to make late into development.
Girls' Frontline started out as an inspiration work based on Kantai Collection, but with a premise revolving around anthropomorphized firearms instead of anthropomorphized warships. This was in part due to Mica Team anticipating that similar games using "moe anthropomorphism" would become popular in China.
In an early demo build of the game from E3 2014, Luigi was able to perform a wall-jump (possibly as a leftover from Mario's moveset), but for unknown reasons, this was removed in the final version of the game.
During a Q&A with Kotaku in 2015, it was noted that both Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair had a female character that appeared to have been designed to be the player/main character's favorite, the former game having Kyoko Kirigiri and the latter game having Chiaki Nanami. When asked if this was intentional, series creator Kazutaka Kodaka stated:
"For number one, I didn't really specifically think of any female characters as the heroine. In regards to Kyoko Kirigiri specifically, it was just the idea that she was a detective and she had a good thought process that drove her to be perceived in that role for the player. On the other hand, wanting to specifically create a heroine is what drove Chiaki's creation."
Normally, when the player decides to build a public works project, Isabelle will prevent the player from going to the beach while scouting out a potential site due to the instability of the sand there. However, if the player uses cheats or glitches to bring Isabelle to the beach and then talks to her, she will give them the option to state whether or not they want to start construction. Despite this, she will deny the request anyway if the player answers yes; however, she will not cite the quality of the ground, but rather will state that there is no available space. Depending on where they are standing, she will state that the proposed site is either too close to the ocean or too close to the cliff, statements which do not otherwise come up in normal gameplay. This dialogue implies that building public works projects on the beach was considered at one point in development.
Within the game's data are sprites for Glad and Calm Goombas; the final game only features regular, Mad, and Sad varieties. Of note is that the Calm Goombas' sprites depict them with a pastel green palette, whereas the final game only differentiates Calm enemies from regular ones by having them stay asleep until provoked. Both unused Goomba types also feature a considerably different art style compared to the final game, indicating that the removal of color coordination for the Calm vibe occurred at around the same time as the overhaul in the game's aesthetics.
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
•Hotels, which would provide extra accommodation for guests. •Dino-Vet Station, which would have been vital for keeping dinosaurs healthy. •Hunting Platforms, which would let visitors hunt down carnivores in the park from afar.
The Dino-Vet Station can be found in earlier promotional material for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and also within its game files. Likewise with the Hunting Platform, which also still has Audio, Ini and even Rig Files within the game.
This game had two working titles before the final Operation Genesis subtitle was instated: "Jurassic Park: Project Genesis" and "Jurassic Park: The Game".
At some point, forest fires were one of the many disasters that could occur in the player's parks. There was also a Sprinkler System that was planned as an upgrade for structures in-game that would have been used to mitigate the aforementioned forest fires. All of this would be removed in the final game.
Originally, the protagonist of Dog's Life was going to be a female dog named Gem, named for the real-world dog of Frontier Developments chairman David Braben.
Within the game's data are unused voice clips for a solo boss fight against Professor Calamitous, who in the released game only appears during the final battle against the full Syndicate. Some of these clips feature Calamitous threatening to destroy Retroville with a doomsday device, a subplot not present in the final game. This implies that Jimmy Neutron's route was originally going to follow the same formula as Danny Phantom, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Timmy Turner's routes, in which the team visits an individual character's world and foils a villainous scheme by an individual member of the Syndicate there. This is corroborated by a pre-release screenshot in which the monochrome Retroville simulation seen in "Fantastic Voyage of Goddard" is instead in full color.
At the time of its release, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis had managed to include nearly every on-screen prehistoric species found in the movies released up to that point ("Jurassic Park", "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III"), with only three notable exceptions:
•Pteranodon (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III") •Compsognathus (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III") •Mamenchisaurus (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park")
Interestingly, out of this batch, the Iquanodon is the only dinosaur to have any more data pertaining to it with its own "Iguan.ini" file, which makes it the only cut species with a known Length (Aprox. 9 Meters Long), Health (500), Life Span (4 Years and 6 Months), and Herd Size (1-15 Individuals). It also had a known attack damage (150), which would have it made it the strongest Ornithopod in the game had it been included.
The development team for this game experimented with baby dinosaurs midway through the project, attempting to use schemes such as scaling the adult dinosaurs down to make them infants. The team realized that this didn't look right and that making proper infant dinosaurs would require new models and AI, which would be similar to the work required for adding more dinosaur species. As a result, baby dinosaurs were dropped, along with any ideas for a "Dino Petting Zoo".
The final version of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis includes only 25 dinosaur species. However, the development team had originally hoped to include 40 species very early on, with many of them implied to be sea-dwelling and flying creatures. Ultimately, this was whittled down to the 25 dinosaurs seen in the final game due to time constraints, and also the developers wanting to focus on creating fewer, but more interesting dinosaurs, as opposed to a larger number of less interesting dinosaurs. As such, they decided to make the dinosaurs they had count and focus on species that players would recognize from the films.
Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales was originally intended to be a straight port of Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind to the Atari Jaguar, owing to the Jaguar's hardware similarities to the Sega Genesis. It was ultimately decided that, due to the age of Claws Encounters at the time, it would instead be a new game built off of the older game's engine. Accolade were not able to provide source code for Bubsy 2 due to it not having been completed at the time.
In the seventh episode of each course, the player is required to chase down and defeat Shadow Mario to obtain a Shine Sprite, which spawns from his dematerializing body as he teleports away. In actuality, the Shine Sprites are stored at fixed locations and are simply teleported to his location by the flag "appearShineFromKageMario". If the flag is replaced with "appearShineFromNPC", the Shine Sprites appear where they are stored, implying that these were their originally intended locations. The fixed points in "Shadow Mario Revisited", "Hold It, Shadow Mario!", and "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" also feature dedicated cameras for spawning cutscenes, corroborating the idea.
Of note is that the internal location for the Shine Sprite in "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" places it partially inside Pianta Village's golden mushroom, which further implies that this object had its height raised at some point during development.
According to art director Ikeno "Daigo Ikeno" Metaka, Dragon's Dogma's cover artwork was inspired by the Japanese covers of Dragon Quest, and also Dragon Quest II, because of the pawn placement on that cover. Both covers were illustrated by Akira Toriyama, and this information was revealed after his death was announced in March 2024.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
This game had two working titles before the final Operation Genesis subtitle was instated: "Jurassic Park: Project Genesis" and "Jurassic Park: The Game".
At some point, forest fires were one of the many disasters that could occur in the player's parks. There was also a Sprinkler System that was planned as an upgrade for structures in-game that would have been used to mitigate the aforementioned forest fires. All of this would be removed in the final game.
Within the game's data are unused voice clips for a solo boss fight against Professor Calamitous, who in the released game only appears during the final battle against the full Syndicate. Some of these clips feature Calamitous threatening to destroy Retroville with a doomsday device, a subplot not present in the final game. This implies that Jimmy Neutron's route was originally going to follow the same formula as Danny Phantom, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Timmy Turner's routes, in which the team visits an individual character's world and foils a villainous scheme by an individual member of the Syndicate there. This is corroborated by a pre-release screenshot in which the monochrome Retroville simulation seen in "Fantastic Voyage of Goddard" is instead in full color.
According to art director Ikeno "Daigo Ikeno" Metaka, Dragon's Dogma's cover artwork was inspired by the Japanese covers of Dragon Quest, and also Dragon Quest II, because of the pawn placement on that cover. Both covers were illustrated by Akira Toriyama, and this information was revealed after his death was announced in March 2024.