Little Squire

You find yourself out on a mission to escort a young prince home to his castle. On your way you will face multiple challenges which brings you to realize that relying on one another forms you to grow stronger

The aim is to make the player experience the feeling of TRUST,

which was one of the main requirements for this game project

THEME OF

TRUST

Game Design Document

Design Pillars Key Features

Trust

Envoke the player to experience the feeling of trust. Gradually grow a relationship of companionship between the two characters with their very diverse personalities

Solve Puzzles

Progress by solving the different variations of interactive puzzles brought about by natural obstacles. With each step closer to your goal, the difficulty steadily increases

Explore

Immerse yourself in the medieval setting with just a spark of magic and fantasy, while traveling both in- and outdoors. Experience the scenery through the eyes of the traveling duo, filled with their backstories contributing to a contrasting view of the land

Cooperate
Find your synergy by learning how to work together, despite the circumstances. Someone may lend you a helping hand - accept it in your time of need - to later return that favor

Game Loop Timeline

Progression
As the game progresses the difficulty of each level ascends, as more thinking becomes required to complete the puzzles. The difficulty curve of the game is also similar to the curve of how the characters' trust for one another grows — steady and stable. The levels flow with intense puzzles followed by breathers

Pacing

The first puzzle serves as a tutorial, to introduce the player to the game's world, mechanics, and its story
The second puzzle introduces new mechanics and interactions which the player can perform together with the AI, while yet staying side to side with the pace of their ever so growing relationship
The third puzzle allows the player to use all of their previously learned mechanics to create a sense of confidence, control over the situation and achievement

My Contribution Content

Game Design

My role during the game production was Game Designer, as well as the Product Owner. I would assist in maintaining the end-vision of the game and work a lot with communication across all of the disciplines within our team. All of our three designers in our team would work together on making the different types of puzzles in the game, both concepting and prototyping them

Narrative Design

As a team, we came up with the idea of the medieval game story about a king, prince and, mercenary, which I would take upon to develop further. Making storyboards and writing the game's dialogue script, among others are some of the things I worked on during the making of the game

Level Design

The world of Little Squire is rather large and required all of our designers to work together with close contact and good communication on the levels of the game. By getting to know one another better – strengths and preferences – we could effectively work together to achieve the final product, but in the end, we had to make compromises as time got short and some levels had to be redesigned into amazing looking 2D cutscenes!

Project Management Scrum

Agile Workflow

Our team would work together by using weekly sprints. We used an online collaborative website so-called Miro, by setting up a virtual whiteboard which everyone in the team had access to

Scrum Methodology

Weekly sprint reviews and retrospectives. During the project, we used elements from the scrum methodology such as user stories, tasks, product backlog, daily stand-up meetings, and scrum poker

Product Owner
As the product owner, I support the team by helping everyone stay on track with our game vision by looking over finished content to make sure it stays coherent and suitable for the final product

Design Details Deep Dive

Mechanics

The player can interact with the world around them through a set amount of mechanics which they will need to perform to progress

Pushing and pulling boxes
Stepping on pressure plates
Pulling levers
Commanding the AI to execute a specific task

Moveable in a grid pattern

Box activates the pressure plate

Box — Pressure Plate — Lever design concepts

Adding a set of combat mechanics is something we would discuss back and forth, but because of the time limitation, we instead decided to focus on what we already have and make it good! Pulling boxes and levers may be part of some of the oldest mechanics in games, but do make up a solid ground for both a world interactive experience for the player and helps us to keep the balance between the simple gameplay and the narrative

Puzzles

While designing the puzzles we would to through multiple drawings and iterations which we later would prototype using white boxes in the engine to test out what we liked and how it would affect the level flow

Puzzle Room #1 Concept

Puzzle Room #1 Iteration

As the first puzzle is meant to serve as a tutorial, we decided to decrease its difficulty to instead give the player a little taste of the game's core mechanics. Having the mentality of starting small to later add more was also really helpful for us as we had to make sure to not overstep the time limit of how long the game was going to take to play from start to finish. This way we could make a more accurate time estimation while working on each puzzle as we knew we could always add more to it as we went along

The initial idea for the third puzzle was completely reworked as we realized the number of assets required started piling up. Going from a river puzzle where platforms would function through water-driven wooden wheels we redesigned the puzzle room to become a perceivably endless abyss

Puzzle Room #3 Concept

Puzzle Room #3 Iteration

Besides changing the theme of the puzzle to ease the workload for our artists, why did we change the concept and mechanics within the puzzle? We decided to go from only 3 platforms to a total of 9, because it would give us the opportunity to make the puzzle a little bit more advanced than it already was. Instead of having both a player-side, an AI-side, and a bridge-side we change it so that the bridge is the side the player will control while the AI is still separated from the player doing their own thing, somewhere the player can not go themself. Each platform serves a story purpose which will come in to play as the player performs the different tasks. We didn't want the last puzzle to feel too straight forward nor scripted, and instead allow the player to feel like their actions had consequences and impacted the gameplay in one way or another

River Puzzle

Abyss Puzzle

The thought behind the abyss puzzle room is related to how far the characters' relationship has come. In the last puzzle, the characters have to work together as not everything works in their favor and their trust really gets put into play. Raising the stakes at the final puzzle making it the most difficult in the current game is what we were aiming for while designing it to really make the player stop and think how to advance through the puzzle

UI & UX

During gameplay, we decided that there won't be much UI need, else than the interaction pop-up which the player receives while trying to interact with an object in the world

When aiming over an interactable item the player will be informed with what key they will have to press to use it

Crosshair

As a product owner, I would help the team from going off-road with the vision and keeping things consistent, all from in-game to out in the menus. Coming up with our UI style we wanted to stick to our gentle medieval theme

As the player spawns into the game they find themself in a small room which serves as a safe tutorial zone, where they can get all the time they may need to get comfortable with the controls. Then once they got the basics down they can with ease progress by opening the door ahead of them

Guiding the player by their own characters emotions and reactions to the environment to set a mood

Story & World Design

Once we decided on a story idea, I took upon myself to further expand the plot and present different story ideas to my team. I would make us a storyboard to make it easier for everyone to refer to the different parts of our game

Storyboard paint over by our 2D artists

Final cutscene storyboard frames

As the team had a hard time deciding on what kind of ending we wanted, I came up with a bunch of options and rated them on a scale of how "nice to bad" they would come across. This helped us start up discussions and conclude on one

Character Design

By making some character profiles we could more easily grasp the idea and the personality behind the actions of each character. What is it that each character wants and how will they achive it?

Story and Dialogue Script

Using a spreadsheet I could easily write out the screenplay for the game, by filling out which was the scene, which character does what and the dialogue or action perform at the time. This documentation became of big use as I would, later on, implement the dialogue into the engine

Click here for the full screenplay

To bring out the right emotions from the player I decided to do some research alongside writing the narrative. How did people live during medieval times? Considering the game has a slight touch of low-fantasy to its world I could still bend and break some of the rules to make the game's story a bit more fun than reality would normally allow

Level Building
From concepts and drawings to blocking out our levels to prototype them in the engine where we can test out the flow between the levels and adjust the pace of which the player will progress at, only to later set dress and finalize them

Initial World Concept

Level Sketches

Blocking out Puzzle Room #3 in Unity 2019.3.11f1

Slide me!

Travel Section #1 Collision Comparison

Invisible walls are not something I'm a big fan of, but necessity knows no law when running low on time! Something I would instead like to try out is a system that would make the playable character stagger and wobble to quickly take a step back showing that they know they should not go any further when close to the edge of the map

Puzzle Room #2 Blockout

Puzzle Room #2 Final Product

After blocking out and testing the size and the functionality of our levels, set dressing came next. We would get 3D assets from the artists which we could simply replace our blockout with. This process would take long and required multiple people to work as our style is closer to realism than stylized. The assets were very nice to work with as we could twist and turn them to make new looking scenes and shots from the same rock asset

Light from outside the cave coming in to guide the player

God rays shining from the windows down on the stairs

Magical light, big god rays, and the sense of escape was something we knew early on we wanted to work around. This became very real as we started working with the light within each level, discussing and testing out where we could help out the player by guiding them with a light source. Progressing from a dark basement and cave environment to a bright and warm cliffside makes the player feel a strong sense of ease and freedom as they find their way outside. This is not to mention later on broken as they realize they have to go back into another cave to progress... which only allows us to make them feel released as they once again get to leave the cave a final time!

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Emailsara.svedlund@futuregames.nu

Sara Svedlund

Game Designer

Little Squire

Game Project at FutureGames

TRUST

Sara Svedlund

Sara Svedlund

Game Designer