A story 23 years in the making
As our studio's first game, we are so grateful that people want to play our game. The first inkling of this game started when James & Bidds met in 2001. Though they went their separate ways, they have wanted to make a game together ever since.
We are so happy that we can share that game with all of you now. This stunning papercraft launch trailer was made with Paper Engineers, Julia Yus and Yeray Pérez Vallejo.
The Plucky Squire is now available. We hope it can bring a bit of the joy we felt while making it.
The story behind the story
On a trip to Japan James ended up in an interview for a certain popular game series you may have heard of. 17 years in Japan later, he had many Pokémon mainline and spinoff games under his belt.
At the same time Bidds had started his own studio and he was making some very unique stuff. Fluidity was a liquid-based physics puzzler published by Nintendo while The Swords of Ditto blended roguelite elements, branching narratives in an rpg adventure. There was even the Stealth series in between. Which you probably can guess, were stealth games.
After all those escapades and adventures they wanted to return to that original dream. To make their own game together.
James had been honing a visual style and even started an online comic series called Cosmic which you can see above. From there, they thought of a game that took place in a book. And from there, they wanted to incorporate the 3D elements they had learned along the way. And so the concept of The Plucky Squire was born. A game in a storybook where you could jump out of the book and into the real 3D world.
This would be a big technical challenge especially for a very small team. Making fully fleshed out 2D and 3D gameplay would almost be like making 2 entire games. But by putting their heads together, they figured it out. To switch seamlessly between the dimensions the game would render both worlds at the same time, overlaying the 2D gameplay onto 3D objects.
From everyone at All Possible Futures, thank you for playing The Plucky Squire. We hope it's a story to remember.
If you liked reading about development, there is also the Deluxe Edition containing a curated collection of concept art in the form of a digital art book and the official soundtrack by Mike Georgiades. Getting them all together saves you 15% on the whole bundle!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1627570/The_Plucky_Squire/
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/44990/The_Plucky_Squire_Deluxe_Edition/