Hi, everyone!
Wondering what makes Little Goody Two Shoes such a singular experience?
Because it's such a narrative-driven game, many of our decisions when it comes to game design were made based on its story beats and overall progression.
Little Goody Two Shoes’ main goal is simple – work during the day and assure your survival through the night in order to progress through the story. Thus, all of its gameplay elements end up relying on this simple night-and-day cycle to give the game its pacing and sense of progression.
It’s during the day that Elise visits Kieferberg and completes her Chores to make a living. Because so much of your time is spent working, we took this concept of chores (chopping wood, gathering eggs, etc.) and embodied them in the form of quick mini-games which make Elise’s tasks fun to play and engaging.
This conclusion wasn’t reached right away and took a lot of back and forth!
One of the things we thought of incorporating as a gamification of Elise's daily chores were riddles – think Professor Layton's math based puzzles, for example!
Below is an illustration meant for one of said riddles in which Elise would have to figure out which buckets (from a selection of four and each with distinctive characteristics) she would have to use in order to make it to the well and back in only one trip.
Ultimately, we found that having to solve riddles every day wasn’t as engaging as the mini-games, so we decided to focus on making more of them to fill out Elise’s daily schedule.
The Romantic Dates you go on with your chosen love interest – Rozenmarine, Freya or Lebkuchen – are also only available during the day and were designed to make you, the player, as attached to them as possible!
It’s during the night that the other gameplay elements of Little Goody Two Shoes get to shine, those being the survival exploration of the Woodlands and the puzzle solving mechanics.
Because it’s a horror game, we felt it would be interesting to forgo the inclusion of a combat system and strip the player of any mechanisms of defense usually found in other titles in the genre.
While the main reason for this decision was to make the player feel vulnerable in the face of danger, we also meant it as a nod to our previous title, Pocket Mirror, and all the RPG Maker Horror games which came before it and inspired us to become game developers in the first place.
Many of such titles rely on puzzle solving and environment exploration to immerse the player in their unique worlds, which is what we aimed to achieve with Little Goody Two Shoes!
We hope some of these will shed some light onto why Little Goody Two Shoes is the way that it is and if you have any more questions regarding the game’s production feel free to let us know!
Thank you so much for reading this far and for all of your support! 💖
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