Planned features that were never officially cut stay on the list, consume mental overhead and never get built.

---

What It Looks Like

The backlog keeps growing. Every conversation adds new ideas as “maybe.” By hour 30 there are 15 planned features and 3 are done. The remaining 12 are all “in progress” or “maybe later.” Deciding what to work on takes longer and longer because the list is too large to reason about clearly.

---

DDRKirby’s Backlog

DDRKirby’s post-mortem for LD37 lists around ten planned features that never made it into the game. Random events, minigames, a pre-compo phase. The list reads like an unfinished task queue, items added as ideas without a corresponding decision about whether they were actually in scope. Nothing was officially cut, so everything stayed technically planned. [1]

The result was scattered effort and a final product shaped more by what survived the chaos than by what was intended.

---

Why It Happens

Adding a feature to a list costs nothing in the moment. But every un-cut feature is a deferred decision and deferred decisions compound. Kaitila notes that feature creep is the most commonly reported problem in game jam post-mortems, the same problem that affected 71% of AAA projects in a Gamasutra study. [2] The time frame shrinks. The pattern does not.

At hour 36, exhausted, a bloated backlog does not hurt because of the features in it. It hurts because nobody knows what matters anymore.

---

The Compounding Problem

Each undecided feature:

• Takes mental energy every time someone looks at the list
• Creates false hope that it might still get built
• Blurs what the game actually is
• Makes scope conversations harder because everything is technically still in scope

---

Fix

BP #3 — MoSCoW: categorize everything at hour 6 and write the Won’t Have list explicitly so nothing creeps back in.