Little Me

Overview

Little Me started as an ambitious standalone indie game intended for a commercial release on Steam. As development progressed, the scope and direction evolved, and it ultimately found a much more meaningful purpose as it was completely repurposed and customized as a unique, playable birthday gift for a close friend.

The Original Vision

The game was supposed to be a reflection on how a child sees the world full of wonder and mysterie but also full of scary things and danger. This would allow me to experiment a lot with the design and look of the game as well as the enimies and settings. It was supposed to be a 2d platformer explorer akin to Thomas Brush’s incredible Pinstripe where the player could explore around and slowly uncover the mysteries underneath.

When I set out to build the game for Steam, the main technical focus was on:

• Building a robust player controller.
• Designing scalable level architecture.
• Implementing save states and progression systems.
• Develop a compeling story and game structure

Hurdles and Pivoting

As I was developing everything I saw myself drifting away from the original vision and focusing more on technical matters such as render distance and camera controls on the technical side or even Inverse Kinematics and character/scenery design which are all very interesting but they really took me out of the Little Me development mindset. I still was very interested in this project but the interest started shifting from Little Me itself and more to the engineering part of developing a video game. I started to think that this would be too ambitious a project as my first big video game project so slowly I started losing interest and stopped development altogether.

As luck would have it I started looking into this project again as the birthday of a close friend started to arrive so I thought I could repurpose all my assets and build a birthday game experience for him

Transforming a commercial project into a personal gift required stripping out generic elements and weaving in inside jokes, personal lore, and custom assets.

Key Customizations:

1. The Protagonist: Re-sprited the main character to resemble my friend.
2. Inside Jokes as Mechanics: The main goal of the game shifted to shooting gamer enimies with rubik’s cubes out of a bazooka
3. The Final Level: Designed a specific ending sequence that delivered the actual birthday message.

Technical Implementation

The game was developed using Unity and scripted in C#. All art for the game was hand crafted using Photoshop with my own style which I developed for cursor only use.

Some of the interesting technical challenges included:

• Asset Management: Handling custom sprite sheets and animations.
• State Machines: Building the logic for enemy AI or puzzle states.
• Optimization: Ensuring the game ran smoothly on their specific hardware without requiring a massive installation.

Retrospective

While Little Me never made it to the Steam storefront, it was a massive success in its final form. It taught me the importance of scoping a project correctly and proved that software doesn’t always need a mass audience to be highly impactful.

Sometimes, the best software you can write is for an audience of one.