Overview
As a director my main role was to led the design, narrative and art team to achieve our design and player experience goals.
Experience Goals
- Make the player feel like a kid: evoke the feeling fo being small, vulnerable, playful, and childlike through mechanics.
- Make the player feel protected: creating a NPC companion that feels genuinely caring fo the player and the one leading the journey
- Make the player curious about the world: Don’t explain the world and the narrative. Hint at it, let the player piece things together.
All this following some specific design constraints that I wanted from the start. 1) No dialogue or direct VO. Have movement, animation and simple audio cues move the story forward and 2) simple accesible gameplay. Movement plus two buttons for actions is all we need. I want this to be playable by little kids.
My mains inspirations come from Famito Ueda design style (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The last Guardian) and games like Limbo and Inside from Playdead Games.
Current progress
1. The Playground
The Playground is like a kid and their parent hiking through a forest. There’s no clear objective besides following the Guardian’s lead This section is all about discovery and exploration. When designing mechanics and interactions specially here, we’re guided by one question: What would a kid do on a forest hike? Climb rocks, run downhill, jump in puddles, balance on branches etc. Small, playful moments that express wonder.
Traversal mechanics and systems
In the process of answering those question we currently have a mechanic for branch walking (using paths with splines), one for piggybacking on the Guardians shoulder and one for lilypad jumping (using PCG tools to place the lilypads the player jumps to). We are currently playtesting and refining them.
Old Vertical slice
In this video you can see our bug chase scene, which is where the Kid finds a shiny bug and decides to run off from the Guardian, only to find himself in danger at the end. April 2025
Progress gallery
