Hi everyone!
It's officially been one full year since the release of Little Goody Two Shoes on October 31st, 2023!
We'll be sharing a little more about its production throughout this following post — both what made it into the final version we all know today, but also what didn't stick!
Before we get into it, we'd like to take the chance to thank you for playing Little Goody Two Shoes and supporting AstralShift in our first commercial release. Game development has been an exciting, but challenging road and we can't wait to bring you more of the best we can produce in the future! 💖
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Originally thought up as a prequel to Pocket Mirror Classic (2016), Little Goody Two Shoes was first announced in that very same year. It's been a long time since then and many things have changed — from the overall scope and art style, to the narrative and design — this title has been growing and changing since the first day it was first devised!
Below is one of the very first promotional images we created for it back in 2016 and as you can see, the art style took quite the turn! This is naturally due to our Creative Director, Kirarin's, personal artistic journey which is reflected in AstralShift's releases.
However, as we became more ambitious with this title, and as our creative direction grew, so did its scope. Initially, Little Goody Two Shoes was going to be a simple and straightforward RPG Maker game with a playtime duration of around 45 minutes — clearly that didn't happen!
We soon realized we needed a new engine to tackle our vision and decided to go with Unity which allowed us to not only make a much more ambitious game, but use the extent of our creativity.
One of the things Unity allowed us to do was work with bigger, traditionally painted backgrounds and assets which allowed us to give everything a more organic and fairy-tale look!
All of these lovely backgrounds were created by our Lead Environmental artist's, Hika, who uses a ton of mixed media techniques to give everything the final look we all know and love!
Unity also allowed us to get much more ambitious with the UI and its design — do you recognise these?
However, Unity didn't only allow us to spread our creative wings when it comes to the visuals of Little Goody Two Shoes, but also its gameplay.
Before we had to cut down on content due to time constraints, Little Goody Two Shoes was meant to have a total of six different woodland areas including the ones featured in the game.
Each one of these would have their own associated animal, their own theme and puzzles, and would allow us to flesh out more of Elise's character development and themes throughout the week!
The game's romantic interests, Rozenmarine, Freya and Lebkuchen, would also have their very own themed woodland area on Saturday with thematic puzzles and character interactions — the idea was to survive your journey through each of the girls' psyche in order to make the final offering!
While these ideas never left the drawing board, other ambitions were scrapped mid-production such as more mini-games and even riddles like the one below!
These would be available alongside the already existing mini-games, have their very own companion illustrations and only be available once throughout the entirety of the game!
This one below would be a simple riddle about transporting chicks from one coop to another whilst protecting them from village cats — very similar to the famous River Crossing Puzzle!
While the idea was to bring more diversity to the kinds of chores available to Elise, we eventually scrapped it and focused more on developing as many mini-games as we could! Sadly, only 4 of them ever made the cut, but there were a ton of other ideas such as Squash the Roach and Sweep, Sweep, Sweep!
Sweep, Sweep, Sweep specifically would have you compete against Freya to clean as many of the Inn's rooms as possible within a certain time limit!
It wasn't all content, however, as there were also whole mechanics we decided to scrap — some even at the last minute, as was the case with Reputation which you'd have to juggle alongside Supicion!
As complete and extensive as Little Goody Two Shoes' Original Soundtrack is, there are still two songs that could never be brought to life — those being Freya's and Lebkuchen's insert songs. Sadly, we couldn't get started on those due to time and budgeting constraints, but would've loved to have them included in the game alongside Elise's and Rozenmarine's!
Something that also underwent quite a few changes was the game's title screen.
Initially meant to be the top illustration, we ultimately decided to go for the current one after some ideas and re-concepting!
The same didn't happen for the girls' redesigns, however — these were an immediate success!
Some other assets simply could not be added to the game because they either came in too late, or we simply ran out of time to add more stuff such as these illustrations of each of the girls.
Despite everything that had to be cut from the game's production, we're still very happy and proud of the final product, but there was always something more scratching at the back of our minds...
That's right — we planned out a full fledged DLC for Little Goody Two Shoes with its own full storyline, cast of characters and ending. It would take place around 60 years before the events of Little Goody Two Shoes and follow the story of Alpenrose, Sanni and Valerie, three Kieferberg girls who went missing under mysterious circumstances.
But there's one more character added to the mix — can you guess who this is?
Thank you so much for reading this far! We hope this was a fun read and that you enjoyed getting to know more about Little Goody Two Shoes' production and some of the cut content we couldn't disclose until now!
Little Goody Two Shoes is very special to everyone at AstralShift and we're not only proud of our first commercial title, but very happy about all of the love, support and engagement it's gotten throughout this past year. We love interacting with our community and much of what we do is motivated by you guys!
We hope our future titles will resonate just as deeply with everyone and will be doing our best to bring forth our absolute best moving forward as well!
See you soon!❤️🔥
PS: Welma doesn't have a full body illustration, unless? 👀
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