I managed to get in contact with some anonymous sources from Shandy Pants Studios! (To reiterate, I am an independent archivist with no legally defined connection with the developers, and am *definitely* not a 1st party as defined by section 4.7.28 of their Confidential Disclosure and Exports Agreement).
Apparently when gaining the first round of seed funding from the Tortoise Island Media Fund, the developers agreed to make the in-game location a 1:1 scale replica of Tortoise Island! While it's extremely impressive that they managed to map the landscaping to the nearest millimetre 😮 (trust me I've seen the photo comparisons!), it was a bit of a major issue in development, considering that about 70% of Tortoise Island is made up of flat plains of grass 😑
of course, this wouldn't have been a problem! Due to the 67 hours of scripted content originally planned for the game (The completionist time was estimated to be about 4027 hours, but it also included a mission where you had to count each blade of grass on the island). On top of this, they managed to negotiate a sponsorship with the TT (Tortoise Trophy) in order to bring motorbike racing to the game. The motorbikes could get from one side of the island from another in just 2 minutes, the tortoplane (planned for the shell Islands expansion pack) could get from one side to the other in just 30 seconds, and the tortoporter could get from one side to the other in only -2 seconds! (Yes, I asked how that worked. No, I didn't get an answer). None of these materialised by the time the plug was pulled though 😥
When I asked why the game felt so broken and fragile-feeling, I was told "Life is fragile, and 'You did WHAT?!?! with my salad?' is the most true-to-life game there is". After telling them to to knock off the BS marketing spiel, I was told that they just ran out of time before the funding dried up 😥 apparently though the save system was actually fully working all along though, so at least that's good I guess! 😅
Finally, they said thank you so much for playing! The whole team is very sad they can't talk about the game directly, and can't publicly make their case to The Game Awards. They've also said for future players to make sure to grab the salad! 🥗 or that might otherwise break things.