Since Jot existed before the game, albeit in a lesser capacity, we wanted to know if James felt comfortable “reusing” the character. “I think if you haven’t done anything that’s really super established, other than Pokemon or the official projects you’ve worked on, no one really cares that much. A few people read my online comic, [if] I can bring them into the game… they can be happy to see him!”
Moving Jot—and other characters like Moonbeard (a supporting character in the game)—from a cute online comic to a children’s book video game was a natural fit. It was a “very early idea” to frame The Plucky Squire around a storybook that you can jump into and out of, all born from his art style.
“I have this simple, minimalist illustration style, and I wanted to make a game that incorporated that style. So I thought about what it could be, and the idea that came to me was a children’s book.” His early art was partly inspired by a storybook – Helen Nicoll and illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski’s Meg and Mog, a British staple – because of “the boldness of those illustrations”. .
Discussions with his co-director Bidds progressed quite quickly, and soon Turner was thinking not just outside the box, but outside the box book. To achieve this, the pair wanted to expand on an element that is crucial to the game. “The idea of surprise was interesting to us. You turn the page and there is a new surprise on each page [when you read a book]. And then we thought, ‘What could be the biggest surprise? What if you could jump out of a book and run?'”
It was a surprise every time it happened when we played. Even when Jot moves between the left and right pages of the book, he goes from 2D to 3D as he flies through the air and then back to 2D when he lands on the opposite page. This element of unexpectedness is something the team found “kind of difficult”. There are gameplay shifts, secrets, and gameplay mechanics that have been hinted at or teased, but there are many more surprises to come.
“There’s always a push and a pull,” Turner said. “Marketing wants to show more of the game, but at the same time, they completely understand that you don’t want to give away too much, but you want to put something cool and flashy in the trailer…. But you don’t want to spoil the experience.”
Right at the start of our game we were greeted with a charmingly narrated section that looked like it was ripped straight from a BBC children’s show. When asked about it, Turner – who is from the UK – nodded with a smile. “The narrator is Philip Bretherton. He was actually an actor in a BBC series so he has that experience. He is great. I love working with him and recording all the narration. There’s an agency website called Damn Good Voices with a lot of actors with little samples of their work, so we just went through them and tried to find a voice we liked.” The team knew when they found the right person because Bretherton wasn’t “just the voice, this Yippee voice.”
That’s exactly the kind of attention to detail that caught our eye while playing The Plucky Squire. Translating Turner’s “minimalist” art style into 3D is something that works really well, and we couldn’t help but ask about the process behind making Jot look great in 3D.
“We were actually a little too literal at first. When Jot was out of the book, we did some cell shading to make him look more like him [in the book]but for some reason it kind of got rid of the feeling of the weight of the outside world… [Because Jot is] the center of your focus [it] the team switched to a “properly 3D-shaded” style, and Turner says it instantly “grounded” the hero. “We kept his face very simple… we didn’t give him the whites of his eyes, we kept those two marks.
While the book and the element of surprise are two parts of The Plucky Squire, it’s also a game about staying creative and letting kids express themselves. We saw so much of it throughout our play and Sam – the boy who is at the heart of the story and who loves The Plucky Squire – has a presence that can be felt throughout with the doodles on the table, the stickers lying around and who exactly is making all the mess on these tables. We haven’t seen it ourselves, but we have a feeling we already know who it is.
We were particularly interested in the stickers – the level we played was space-themed, so we saw aliens, planets and quirky colors all stuck to a wooden table. Those stickers were actually hand drawn by Turner’s friends. One particularly notable contributor was designer Geralt z Witcher; we didn’t get a chance to ask who else might have contributed, but these are the kinds of easter eggs that will have us digging around the game like excited kids.
If it’s not already obvious, children and childlike wonder are at the heart of the game. Turner explained to us the implications of the game’s story. “If Humgrump. [the villain who is trying to end creativity] he takes over the book, it’s going to be bad for their world, but it’s also going to be bad for Sam because it’s his favorite book and he kind of loses his inspiration. You’re fighting for your own world, but you’re also fighting to keep Sam inspired.” And the dress-up set really gives that sense of childlike curiosity that we want to preserve.
Plucky Squire is the “topic of conversation” in the Turner household. “My son calls it ‘The Plucky Square,'” he told us. Turner’s children helped inspire some of the options for the game, from showing levels and testing to character designs: “I’ll show my son a design and get his approval on it—which one is cuter or which one looks cooler—and he’ll pick the designs and then I’ll know , which one is the best.” It’s certainly a factor in how authentic the experience feels.
This of course leads ka lots of character cuts. “I think we actually played two games. Half of it is on the cutting room floor and half of it is in the game.” One such character who almost got hit was Jelly King, an NPC present in Chapter 6. He was first present in a “completely different form” and instead of helping from sides, “the jelly king followed you. on the table and you would bounce off it to get over the high platforms.” However, the team thought that the limitation of higher jumps was too restrictive, so the jetpack ended up replacing the king. Fortunately, they managed to get him back on the mug.
All the while we were walking around the table, discovering stickers, drawings, paper clips and the like and reliving the magic of childhood discovery. Finding some of these objects – and even one of the candles needed to unlock the rocket on the table – inspired the question of how to play with perspective and hide things behind the “mess” on the table. “We discovered the same thing during production [the levels], so we’ve created a few things to reward players for doing so. We have a few things around for you to find.”
We noticed other things that might be considered normal but were important to grounding the story, such as British electrical outlets (for “the history of the outlets,” Turner laughed) and levels set during the day or night. And while the time period is intentionally left “a bit vague”, the aim was to create a world that had a “nostalgic feel to it”. Basically like a children’s room that any of us could have. In real life, electrical outlets don’t excite us, yet we were there with sparkling eyes, noticing those particular things. When we were rewarded with a piece of junk – part of a rocket ship – for completing a mini-game, it perfectly captured the essence of our feelings. Children find treasure alland can be fascinated by trifles; paper clips, doodles, torn paper and plain old pencils. It felt like they were showing us a photo of our bedroom floor or our old desk.
When we shared our feelings with Turner, he nodded. “If [playing The Plucky Squire] it makes people nostalgic or makes them think about their own childhood, that’s always nice to hear.” It’s a game about reliving your childhood, re-reading your favorite book, and keeping that childhood creativity that we’ve all been missing. “We want to [The Plucky Squire] to be a really nice experience for everyone who plays. Forget the world for a bit. Enjoy it.”
And we did that.
The Plucky Squire is coming to Switch in 2024. Let us know how excited you are in the comments below.