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Little Bo Reap - Progression/Narrative Designer
Little Bo Reap is a 3rd person action RPG with RTS elements, in which the player fights and explores the land of Pastoria alongside flocks of undead sheep.
As a Designer, I primarily worked on the game's progression system, as well as worked with our lead Artist to implement a background narrative and lore into the game.
Timeframe - 30 Weeks
Engine - Unity 3D
Team Size - 16 Members
Design Process - Initial Progression Design and Setbacks
From as far back as pre-production, one of the major features I wanted to get implemented and into the game was a progression system of some kind. Due to the game's ever-changing scope and design, my initial plans for progression was a much grander, overarching system with more minute changes.
In this stage of development, Little Bo Reap was still an action RPG first and foremost, with Bo Peep's primary combat abilities revolving around traditional melee combos, and sheep abilities being an afterthought.
Initial Sheet for tracking progression abilities.
(Was never finished, as the player's primary abilities changed drastically before this was complete.)
The initial system saw the player's abilities split into 3 distinct "trees": representing what was at the time the primary chunks of abilities that the player would use: the Crook Tree, which influenced Bo Peep's capabilities. The Sheep Tree, which influenced her special "Sheep abilities", and Dead Ringer, which upgraded her "super mode", known as Dead Ringer internally.
Within each tree, there were 5 levels of upgrades that could be purchased. Each level had 3 upgrades, and the player could choose one of these upgrades to benefit from. Each of these 3 upgrades were tied to a sub-branch for that tree, which had a specific focus, but otherwise was mostly cosmetic. However, the player also received a passive benefit for each skill purchased within each of the major trees.
For example, the more abilities purchased in the Crook Tree, the greater the player's maximum health became.
Second Draft of Progression Abilities (Still Unfinished)
Once the player's primary abilities pivoted to completely remove Bo's ability to do melee combos, I had to completely revamp the player's skill trees. I kept the same system and setup as before, but the three trees were now split into Shepard, a Tree focused on the new abilities that every Sheep had, Sheep, a Tree focused on the stats and summoning economy of each individual Sheep type, and a Dead Ringer Tree, which inherited some of the upgrades form the previous system.
Unfortunately, implementing a system like this at this stage of development, particularly before the Greenlight phase was impractical at best and impossible at worse, so I was requested to shelve the idea and redirect my efforts towards more important matters. That lead to this version of the Progression being pushed back to being one of the features we promised to implement should we pass Greenlight. We did, so when the next semester began, a major rework was in order.
Design Process - Finalized Progression System
Once the game was in a more finalized state following Greenlight, a revisit of the Progression system from scratch was in order. Regardless of abilities, the initial plan was simply too large for the game's heavily reduced scope; we did not obtain any additional designers, and thus had to scale back our plans for levels dramatically to fit these constraints.
As such, my goal during this revamp of the progression system was to simplify and scale down the number of abilities, while still giving the player meaningful options on how they built their character.
Initial Art Concept of Reworked Progression Tree
Surprisingly, the initial concept for the new skill tree came in part from our Lead Artist, who I briefly worked with to design a "theoretical" skill tree to show in our Greenlight presentation. In this system, the abilities were simplified into two categories; passive and active. Each sheep type had a block for passive upgrades to their Damage, Health, and Speed.
Below that, each sheep type had a section of two optional Active abilities, which upgraded the sheep's special abilities in unique ways. These would be unlocked each time the player beat one of the game's 3 major bosses, and once unlocked, the player could swap between those at will.
Reworked Progression Ability Tracker
When the semester started, this was revamped further; passives were made unique to each sheep type, allowing for more interesting abilities than just increasing the same stats for every sheep. Even with the abilities that were just passive increases, the stats that could be increased were unique to each sheep type, and tailored to their role, allowing for upgrades that had a lot more nuance to them than their descriptions would imply.
For example, Fluffy sheep primarily gain survivability in the form of Health. However, this is also a hidden upgrade to their Sheep Vortex ability. Because every "hit" of a Sheep Vortex subtracts from the Fluffy sheep's health, potential damage for that ability is actually tied to their max health. Thus, an increase in maximum health means an increase in maximum damage potential.
The different levels of passives were also removed entirely; instead opting for a single level of upgrade that was more dramatically powerful overall. Doing so made the sense of getting upgrades feel better, ideally allowing the player to instantly feel their power grow the moment they got back into combat.
Design Process - Narrative Implementation
Narrative was a goal that our team had in mind during Pre-Production, but it was never really the focus. As such, we did not really expand our team in anyway that was intended for making narrative. It was more of a side goal than anything else. However, we did still need SOME narrative context in our game.
As I was the only designer on the team with any reasonable narrative experience, I jumped at the chance to integrate narrative into the game. The narrative was a two part effort, however. The actual setting and intended narrative arc of Little Bo Reap came primarily from two sources.
Our lead character artist, Camden, wrote up the closest thing we had to a proper lore document, containing both the information on the setting and the desired "plot" of Little Bo Reap. The setting, Pastoria, was also drawing from the pre-existing setting of a previous student project game that several people on the team had worked on. I was not one of these people, so the lore document was essential to me understanding exactly what it was I was writing for.
Lore Document Screenshots (Credit to Camden Emery for the writing)
Once I had this lore document (and had gone over it with the lead artist to make sure we were on the same page), it was my job to write and implement dialogue to communicate it. As most of our programming resources were focused on getting the game polished and working, the actual tools for communicating the narrative were limited.
Design Challenges - Working with limited Narrative tools
The primary narrative vector in Little Bo Reap are the talking skulls. Internally known as Eekum Bokums, a nod to Banjo Kazooie, these skulls are very mechanically simple. The player may interact with them by pressing the interact button within a certain radius and they will display several text boxes in sequence, while camera control is taken away from the player.
Internally, there's a bit more to them. The Camera angle changes are entirely predefined, baked into the displayed text as part of a scriptable object. Skulls are also capable of supporting up to two "Conversations", which they will cycle between whenever the player interacts with them. So if a player interacts with them once, they get the first conversation. The second time, they get the second conversation, the third time the first conversation again, and so on.
A talking skull. This skull informs the player about Black Sheep and the Dead Ringer ability.
Design wise, the skulls are also pulling double duty; in addition to delivering the narrative, they are also our only reliable tool for introducing players to mechanics. As such, many of their initial conversations need to focus on delivering mechanics before narrative can be focused on. The solution seemed simple enough; the initial conversation could be dedicated entirely to said mechanics, and any "lore" dialogue could be written as part of the second conversation.
However, this created a new problem; many players wouldn't actually talk to the skulls a second time, as they had no way of knowing they worked like that. In theory, having the skulls tell you this fact could solve the issue, but in practice many players are going to either miss it regardless, or simply forget. Instead, I opted to alter the dialogue itself to fit the "worst case scenario" of players not knowing or being willing to talk to them a second time.
Some players, of course, may choose to skip all skulls entirely (aside from a few forced skulls). I opted not to balance the dialogue for this scenario, because at a certain point it would have become detrimental to cram all of the game's plot into those few instances. That, and it can be reasonably assumed that a new player will talk to all of the skulls at least once; the action is prompted and most of the game's skulls are directly in their forward pathway.
Snippets of my Dialogue spreadsheet. (Reformatted for visual clarity)
(Full spreadsheet can be viewed HERE.)
The first conversation is entirely dedicated to what I considered priority information; this includes controls, crucial plot details, and necessary player guidance.
The very first skull is a good example of all 3. It opens with the most important plot detail, the fact that Bo Peep has indeed lost her sheep. From there, it gives basic guidance by establishing the player's goal as "find[ing] out what happened to them." This gives the player something to latch onto, and then transitions into giving the player the basic movement and camera controls. As this is one of the few forced skull dialogues, it is also the best place to do all of this, as it sets up the player for the rest of the game.
Secondary conversations are then primarily used to deliver world details. To accomplish this, I contextualized all of the secondary conversations as Bo Peep directly asking the skulls about themselves. The primary conversations contrast these by opening with lines that imply the skulls talking to Bo Peep first.
A skull shouts at Bo Peep as she runs by.
Phrases such as "Slow down there" or "Hey there!" are used exclusively for primary conversations. Meanwhile, the secondary conversations use phrases like "You want to hear it again?" or "I'm surprised you stopped to speak with me.
A skull talks to Bo Peep in response, implying that Bo is the one initiating the conversation.
Each skull had a name, which I internally tracked within the dedicated dialogue spreadsheet (a great place to store the raw text so it could be easily edited and replaced in game with a few copy-paste commands.) These secondary conversations typically have the skulls introduce themselves by name, and give a cause of death. To prevent player frustration, most of the early control skulls will also bring up the controls in their second conversation, but this isn't a hard and fast rule.
In this way, the skulls were able to serve both a gameplay and narrative purpose, while providing a minor reward for players who choose to prod them further, or as a nice surprise for players who needed to rehear instructions.
In the scenario where a player never interacts with a skull more than once, the basic narrative and motivations stay intact. A player who explores more is rewarded with further story beats and world details, but nothing that is essential to understanding the basic plot. In this way, I think I succeeded. It also had an unintended, but mildly interesting effect on the game's narrative. Effectively, it created two different "editions" of the game's narrative that play upon one another in an interesting way.
Narrative - Themes and "Dual Story" structure
From the beginning, the narrative of Little Bo Reap was always centered around one central theme that of revenge. Even if it wasn't taken too seriously, the idea of Bo Peep's grief driving her to kill was the main motivation that ultimately drives the rest of the plot forward. It naturally begs the question: is this revenge truly worth it in the end?
When working on the dialogue, there was originally a desire to make Bo Peep's arc a bit more nuanced, and have her revenge on Baba Yaga be more morally ambiguous. However, considering the shorter length of the game and our limited scope, we deemed this to be not something that could be pulled off well. As such, killing Baba Yaga is something that in the final narrative is a de facto good option. While she lives, the souls of the damned will never be able to move on, and defeating her is essential to making sure the cycle of life and death can continue.
Instead, I chose to try and focus less on the action itself, and more on Bo's motivations. Even if she's doing the right thing, it's possible to be doing it for the "wrong reasons", which can prevent her from truly healing herself, even if the world itself does.
A Skull gives Bo Peep a reality check.
This idea is reflected back in the gameplay by the existence of two theoretical playthroughs. The standard playthrough, in which a player only talks to each skull once very cleanly reflects a Bo Peep who is simply rushing to kill Baba Yaga. None of the exposition explaining WHY doing this is a good thing is contained in the first round of conversations, so a player who plays this way will experience exactly that; a story about a character who seeks and finds her revenge, without every really questioning why. This applies doubly so if they only listen to "forced" skull dialogue, which provides an even more barebones plot.
It is only through stopping and actively choosing to engage with the other victims of Baba Yaga's crimes that Bo Peep can find peace. It is in these secondary and superfluous conversations that a rationale for her actions beyond simple revenge can be found, along with the lessons imparted by the other skulls. In that respect, it spins a much more positive tale than the first playthrough, perhaps even more if this is a repeat playthrough.
Bo Peep has finished her quest, but that does not fill the hole in her heart.
If there is one thing I could add to the game, it would be the existence of a slightly edited ending monologue, should the player have gone through all of the skull dialogue in a single playthrough. As of right now, this feels a lot more hidden from the player than I wish it was, and it's the major flaw with this set up. Had I leaned more into it, I think it could have really been something special.
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