There's something uniquely exciting about a game with a fresh twist, and that's exactly what The Plucky Squire brings to the table.
The long-awaited debut title All Possible Futures explores perspective-shifting mechanics in a novel way, with its characters existing inside a 2D book but able to jump out of it to explore the world around them in 3D. The title launches today on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch and PC, and was revealed at its publisher Devolver Digital's 2022 Summer Show – a revelation the developers were eager to get out.
“We've always been worried that someone from Nintendo or Ubisoft or just anyone would make a game where you're a character from a book and you get out of the book – because it's an idea that, once you have it, it just goes somewhere and you know that there's something to it,” says Jonathan Biddle GamesIndustry.biz. The co-founder of All Possible Futures (and co-director of the game) previously co-founded Curve Digital and left to go indie in 2015. He then found great success with the 2018 action RPG The Swords of Ditto.
“We released the first trailer quite early because we were so worried about it, we thought what we had was so unique that if anyone else had the same idea, we'd basically be screwed,” he smiles.
“We thought what we had was so unique that if anyone else had the same idea, we'd basically be screwed.”
This first trailer immediately garnered a lot of positive reactions and interest from players, which is due to the exciting mechanics of the game, but also “the message it sends,” says Biddle.
“It's the heart of the game,” he continues. “People want to feel joy. And sometimes that's missing in video games. Obviously, there's a lot of great video games that have a lot of joy in them, but the general way games are going is more and more serious, more grounded, more And we're just trying to amuse.
He says the team enjoyed seeing people's reactions to the original trailer and witnessing the moment it switches from 2D to 3D.
“When you leave the book, there's a microphone drop. It was great. We watched all these people's reactions to it, all that, mouths open, jaws on the floor, and it was perfect. It was exactly what we were trying to do.” to do, and when it hit like that, it was really satisfying, and then we knew we had something that people were really interested in.”
The jaw-dropping effect of the trailer even helped the team in their recruiting efforts.
“We tried to hire people and we couldn't get anyone because you advertise on some forum like, 'Hey everyone, we have a great game.' Everyone else says they have a great game too and [we] we just couldn't get anyone in. As soon as we released the trailer, people were like, “Oh, them.” have they got a great game” and people started signing up.
“And that was one of the really helpful things about that trailer — it brought in people who helped us actually make the game. So it was kind of an advertisement for us and also a stick in the sand. So [we could] say, 'This is what we're doing and we got here first, watch out'.”
A lot of the core ideas of The Plucky Squire were there from the very beginning of development, coming from characters created by another co-founder of All Possible Futures, James Turner (formerly at Game Freak as Pokémon art director). The idea of a 3D book is what first came up.
“And that's really when we think, well, if you have this 3D book, what if you get out of the book and go to the table? From that moment on, it's a game that's revealed itself to us,” Biddle says. “We gradually went through the development and answered the questions: can we animate a character on a book? Does Unreal work with 2D? If we move the character to the edge of the book and turn it into a 3D character, does it work?
“At any point the answer could have been 'no, you can't really do that, it's too complicated'. But every step along the way was very much: yes. I've always evolved anyway, like to start small and then layer it up. That's really my the sweet spot, building something complex out of something small.”
From this initial idea of characters based on a “physical” book, the team created a 25-minute demo that captured how the title connects things (genres, perspectives) in an interesting way.
“And at that point, I think we had the game, pretty much as it is now, just in its infancy. Most of the ideas you see now are much more developed versions of what we had in the original demo. So in some in all respects we have exactly what we envisioned We always say Jamie comes from the top down like the characters the world the story and I come from the bottom up like the nuts and bolts How does it feel we meet in the middle and end up with a game like this which is the result of these two ways of thinking?
The game's unique mechanics presented some challenges — the lighting, for example, was “really tricky,” says Biddle. However, the transition from 2D to 3D “happened quite easily” from a technical point of view – apart from one consistent camera.
“The camera sits in the room and you're trying to follow the characters that are on the texture in the book in 3D, but your characters are up above the room in 2D,” explains Biddle. “And so we have characters that come out of the book and you're going to have to follow them, they'll run over, they'll go into another medium like a mug. It's following them again and they're moving. Making everything seamless.” It was quite challenging for me, but also fun,” he smiles.
Despite the fact that he became de facto technical lead for The Plucky Squire, Biddle doesn't really have a programming background – the team is smaller than the game's appearance suggests. Only four people worked on the original demo, and the team at its peak consisted of only 23 people (including contractors).
“I think he's quite small – I always say we're a bit brave actually, to be honest with you,” laughs Biddle. “We just go in and do it. We fill in the gaps that are there. Both Jamie and I have had a lot of different roles and we've been management in a lot of different places. I wasn't a programmer originally. The way the game was developed, it was code and design in the East and mainly the art in the West I found myself as the lead engineer in many ways, which is really strange because all the other programmers on the team are much better than me and much more experienced, I have never led a technical team before and this was a really complex technological game! “
There have been a fair share of perspective-shifting titles over the years, the best-known indie examples probably being Fez, Monument Valley, or more recently Viewfinder. With the state of the industry being what it is, and The Plucky Squire putting a new spin on the idea, we ask Biddle if being mechanically interesting is more important now than ever.
“I like to start with something small and then layer it up. That's my sweet spot, building something complex out of something small.”
“I'm very careful about generalizing because sometimes the things that stick with people aren't really what you expect, and defining what's unique is sometimes quite difficult,” he says. “And I think sometimes the people who make the games don't realize it until it's out there, and then it blows up and they're like 'Fuck!'. So I think it's hard to plan for it.”
That's in line with what Ustwo Games' Danny Gray told us when we looked back at Monument Valley on its tenth anniversary, talking about how it's “impossible to make a hit.”
“A lot of people spend a lot of time working on a game that's mechanically interesting and spend years on it and it just doesn't go anywhere,” Biddle continues. “And there's a lot of luck involved, and I think it's very hard to take advantage of that opportunity.”
“So if this game is a successful example, I can't point to any part of it that I would say that I would tell someone else to do because in other situations we might not be able to make this game. There are so many factors to success [can] say, 'I worked hard on this game, it should be a success', but there are people out there who also worked so hard and it wasn't a success for them. Well, that's a really tricky question.
“Personally, I'd say I couldn't work on anything that wasn't interesting. Because when you go into something like that, you're like, 'This is four years of my life, how am I going to justify it to myself?'” Every time you jump into development games, it's the right lane, so it's got to be interesting for me, and if things line up, it can follow and if you do it right and hit the zeitgeist and so on.”
When discussing the various aspects of The Plucky Squire, its Zelda-like aspects come up. The title has suffered several delays and it's funny that it's now coming out within a few weeks of the new Zelda title, Echoes of Wisdom.
“You're always going to bump into something,” notes Biddle. “When you start a game, you don't think about the future. And then you hit deadlines. And then you miss deadlines. And then you put the date back and you're here, and then you miss it. again. You put it back and everything is controlled by how this game is ready ? later and we couldn't go earlier, so it's not a problem, it's just reality.”
He continues, “And you know, these days, [launch week] is the beginning, right? It's the path the game is on. So people are interested in it and we will keep people interested in it and I guess it's not that important to me. Plus, we're cross-platform, so that helps too.”
“Ideas aren't the problem. We really had to pull back with this game. We knew there were so many directions we could go.”
So we ask the team's vision at last week's launch if they have any ideas for the future of The Plucky Squire.
“Oh, ideas aren't the problem,” laughs Biddle. “We had to really pull back in this game. We knew there were so many directions we could go. Very early [we] he said let's just do one book because we knew we could do more in a room, for example, and we knew the scope would just expand. We really reeled in all the capabilities that are possible, moving between 2D and 3D. So some of them can now come to the fore and we can develop this “series” more. We have some ideas, nothing is really set in stone yet, so I don't really want to say too much. But it feels like a start. We have something that really resonates with people, [that] we enjoy working on it and it's actually quite liberating.
“There's very little we can't do in our game. If you look around a lot of different genres, we can encapsulate them in what we do, and we do quite often. We probably couldn't be a first-person shooter, but that is probably an asset,” he laughs.
At the end of our chat, we ask Biddle what he hopes for from today's launch.
“It would be nice if it lived up to the potential that we originally saw in it. You know, along the way in any development there are bumps in the road and it's tricky to keep things on track and you can end up not doing so well, I've done it a lot so I think we can live up to the hopes of what people see in it and what they saw in it when they first saw the trailer and for everyone to enjoy it as much as we hope, that's all we really want.”
