A Little to the Left
We’re in the Yogscast Games Tiny Teams event
Which is why we’re hugely excited to take part in the Yogscast Games Tiny Teams event. It’s live right now, here on Steam, and it’s filled with some fantastic games made by fellow tiny teams from around the world.
All week long the Yogscast Games team has been streaming some of their favorite picks from the event, and we’re delighted to confirm that you can watch the A Little to the Left livestream on the festival page as part of the Wholesome Games segment. This will air on Sunday 7 August between 03.00 PDT / 11.00 BST / 12.00 CEST and 06.00 PDT / 14.00 BST / 15.00 CEST, and it features some other lovely wholesome titles too.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out the festival, which is bursting with great games from some incredible tiny teams, and please tune in for the A Little to the Left livestream this Sunday.
Hope to see you there!
Cerebral Puzzle Showcase starts NOW!
One of the reasons we decided to make a puzzle game is that our love for classic puzzle games were one of the first things we connected on. Ever since, we've spent many evenings ruminating over a tricky puzzle together, shifting the pieces back-and-forth trying to reveal a hidden structure, dreaming up outlandish scenarios that just MIGHT be the solution... just gotta try it out and see, right?
Well, we're super excited to announce that A Little to the Left is included in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, starting today, Thursday May 19th and running to Monday May 23rd. There are a ton of amazing puzzle games included in this event, including many of our absolute favs, like Myst, Return of the Obra Dinn, Tetrabot & Co, Infinifactory, and of course, anything by Draknek & Friends.
Be sure to check it out, there's bound to be a slew of gems to discover, and if you haven't tried it yet, give the A Little to the Left demo a spin- it's something unique that you may just not have seen yet.
Hope to see you there!
A Little to the Left Demo | Publisher Livestream
A Little to the Left is a wholesome tidying-puzzle game with stunning visuals, relaxing music and one very cheeky cat.
You can download the demo for free and if you wishlist it, you'll get a little notification when it launches!
Next Fest Livestream
Play the A Little To The Left demo now during Next Fest!
Wishlist A Little To The Left Here
January 2022 Dev Update
Puzzles by the dozens
January was all about puzzles, and we implemented a lot of them! No doubt about it, game development is slow going, but we’ve hit the point where we can focus on the fun stuff: bringing puzzles to life! This month we implemented over a dozen, which brings us over halfway! We have also finalized the mechanics and creative for all the late game puzzles and ending which are going to be way more challenging (but still cozy and playful); they’re definitely going to surprise you!
Who let the cat up on the table?
Flop, flip, swat
January also saw us focusing on our beloved companion, the cat! The amazing Paul Hammond illustrated the cat in all its sassy poses for Una Di Gallo, whose bringing it to life in splendid hand-drawn animation. The cat plays an important role throughout the game, showing up every now and then to impose its way upon your meticulously organized arrangements; but the cat is elusive, so you won’t see it in its entirety until late in the game. Paul and Una have imbued this lovable character with so much… ‘cat’itude… okay, I’ll go ahead and let myself out.
Join us for Steam NextFest, Feb 21 - 28!
One of the reasons this newsletter is late is because we’ve been hard at work putting together a new demo for A Little to the Left that will be featured in Steam NextFest, running for one week from Monday, February 21st until Monday, February 28th. In this demo, we’ll be presenting 10 puzzles, most of which are new never seen before!
We are also busy making a video to accompany the demo, which will feature developer commentary, a behind the scenes peek at our process, an interview and performance by our composer, Justin Karas, as well as lots of other fun stuff! We’ve had so much fun making this video… maybe a little too much…
Annie getting some chores done
We can’t wait to share our demo with you all, so make sure to mark your calendars and join us for Steam NextFest, Feb 21 - 28!
That’s it for January, thanks for reading, we’ll see you again for the next dev log entry in February! Until then, take care!
December 2021 Dev Update
[table]
[tr]
[td]
[/td][td]
[/td][/tr]
[tr]
[td]Annie made these cute paper-mache decorations![/td]
[td]Merry X-Mush to you![/td]
[/tr]
[/table]
We made it through the holiday season and are happily able to focus on the game again, and there is a lot to talk about in the world of A Little to the Left! In this month’s log we’re going to chat about what we’ve been up to this month, but it’s a little less development related and more about what’s on the horizon.
Secret's revealed
Phew! We did it! We kept the secret safe; the Secret Mode secret, that is. We are proud to announce that Max Inferno have signed with the fantastic Secret Mode crew to publish A Little to the Left! We are just over the moon with this newfangled arrangement, as the Secret Mode team has been beyond wonderful and are so impressively knowledgeable.
“We knew instantly after meeting Annie and Lukas that we had the same drive to expand and enhance the wonderful creativity and fun that was already in A Little to the Left” said James Schall, Director of Publishing at Secret Mode. “The game is such a joyful experience, as was recognised with its E3 accolades last year, and I’m excited to share that with the world!”
With Secret Mode by our side, we’ll be able to bring the game to more platforms, support more languages, and make a bigger and better game. It really is a dream come true.
[previewyoutube="OzCavEbq6lM;full"]
Nintendo Switch!
In addition to bringing A Little to the Left to PC and Mac, we’re also excited to announce that A Little to the Left will be landing on the Nintendo Switch too! This has been the #1 request from our fans, and we feel like this will be a great way to play, as the structure of the game really aligns well with the pick-up-and-play quality of the Switch. And so with that, we have some revised release dates for you.
A Little to the Left will be coming to PC, Mac, and Nintendo Switch in August 2022!
And more, we’ll be releasing a mobile version of the game soon after for iOS and Android in Q4 2022.
We want to bring the game to as many players as possible, so we’ll be supporting several languages on release as well.
Follow us here or on social to stay in the loop!
So much to tidy, so little time.
With the end of the holidays and a new year upon us (let’s go, 2022!), it’s given us some time to take a step back and reflect on the past year. It’s been… interesting… to say the least. But we are so thankful to be able to focus on making A Little to the Left; this game brings us so much joy, and we really want to make a cheerful and surprising game for you all, and we’re just having a blast coming up with new tidying puzzles.
There’s a lot to do, so it’s time to get back to it. Thanks for reading! Here’s a look at our second tutorial level where we put away all the fun new toys we got in our stockings and get back to work.
Thank you for all your kind support! We can’t wait to share with you all of the magical interactions we have planned for the game, and hope it brings our players as much satisfaction and delight as it brings to us.
Happy New Year! - Lukas & Annie / Halifax Kjipuktuk Nova Scotia, Canada
November 2021 Dev Update
A Little Help
There’s a lot that happens in indie dev that the player doesn’t see: business development, legal, forecasting, scheduling, communications, marketing, platform relations, event applications, hiring, etc. Our favorite thing about working on the game is talking about puzzle ideas over meals, making art, imagining the user reaction, and sharing in the excitement from our fans. We want to keep focusing on that rather than wear too many hats, so in order to make the game even better and keep things running smoothly, we’re excited to soon announce a new partnership!
We’ve been in chats with some really wonderful publishers to see how we could collaborate to make the development process even better, to get the game to more people, and just make a better game in general. And in good news, we have just signed with a publisher that we are really excited about! I wish we could tell you all about it, but we’re busy working on the announcement and should be able to let you all in on it really soon!
An Apple a Day
We’ve been hard at work adding more puzzles to the game, and we’re super happy with the new content!
We’ve been extending on the “pan” mechanic, which if you’ve played the demo, you’ll remember from the Soup Cans level. We’re now introducing fully wrapping textures which will allow for exploring hidden perspectives on some of the objects. And stickers! You can pluck off stickers and attach them to other objects or simply just drop them (don’t eat them, please).
Scrub a dub-dub
We’ve also been implementing a fun piece of functionality that allows players to bring objects to life by scrubbing through animations. It’s a pretty simple application, but it adds a lot of depth to the interactions. Here’s a look at how it works.
Demo days
We’re also very excited that in-person events have started to come back, because last weekend we attended the first in-person ISNS Mixer event since the pandemic hit (ISNS stands for the Interactive Society Nova Scotia). This was a chance for us to demo A Little to the Left to other local game-devs and get some players to test the game out. It was a great success! It just so happened that the day was stormy with a mix of rain, snow, and hail, and so the coziness of the A Little to the Left world seemed to warm everyone up. Thank you to all who provided your thoughtful feedback!
That’s it for this month, we’ll be back with more info before you know it, and lots of exciting things to announce in December! Make sure to follow us on Steam or Twitter to stay in the loop!
October 2021 Dev Update
Whoosh goes October
When our trailer for A Little to the Left was featured in Wholesome Direct back in June, we had announced a release date of October 21st, 2021… and well, here we are at the end of the month and the game is very much not released. What happened? Simply, we had no idea of the visibility/interest the game would receive from the event, and when it took off as it did we were shocked. We started getting contacted by publishers, media outlets and enthusiastic fans, and we were so pleasantly surprised; video game development has been a dream of ours since we were kids, and with this traction we were afforded the opportunity to focus on development of A Little to the Left, full-time. Yay!
With the success from Wholesome Direct, we saw the opportunity to make a better, larger game. We decided to conceptualize more levels (40 to 55+), some really fun and surprising game modes (more on this soon!) and a wider release (more platforms, languages and territories). And with the scope increase comes not only additional development, but there are a number of business requirements as well. It’s just the two of us doing a whole team’s worth of tasks and as a result we just couldn’t meet the October release date. Luckily for us, our community is amazing and has supported us every step of the way, and so thank you all for being so patient!
Systems shock
We’ve been a bit quiet on sharing our progress lately for a few reasons. One being that we’ve been working towards finalizing the game systems. This isn’t flashy work and it doesn’t look great in gifs, but oh does it add to the feel of the game.
With systems comes boring stuff like menus, settings, languages, UI, game state, save data, controls and transitions… but there’s also a few features that came together this month that we’re really excited to share.
1. Level Select
Oh what a joy (and challenge) the Level Select has been! Personally, we really love creative Level Select menus and wanted to try and capture the magic you feel while playing the game and to apply it to the Level Select. There’s so many aspects that tie into a Level Select- it really is the cross-section of the game and the players interaction with it. In the end, the Level Select code has more lines than any other part of the game and touches almost every corner of the codebase. But it’s all worth it, because we’ve been cruising around this menu non-stop! It’s a lot of fun and we can’t wait to see it grow alongside the game.
2. Controller Support
I’m going to let you in on a secret… we love playing games with controllers. Yes, A Little to the Left really shines with point-and-click and touch controls (it’s very tactile!) but we wanted to make sure that controllers were considered from early on so that we could tailor the experience so that it’s not “best on” any particular platform- we want it to be “great” everywhere! So we’ve spent time this month prototyping and optimizing for controllers. Yes, it’s a slightly different experience with controllers, but we’re really happy with how it feels, and honestly, may even be our preferred way to play! But we’re not going to go into detail about how controller support works here in this newsletter- we’ll have a devoted post that outlines that that for you soon!
3. Chapters
We always had the idea that the game would be split up into segments that were defined by puzzle mechanics and mood, but only this month did we formalize the chapters as a thematic structure. With this came an explosion of ideas and we’re having fun conceptualizing the chapters and how they can drive the game’s arc. The game will have 5 chapters, each with over a dozen puzzles and unique vibe. Check out a work-in-progress chapter title screen below.
That’s it for this month, but we’ve really hit our stride over here and are cooking up all kinds of fun things for you all. Make sure to follow us on Steam or Twitter to stay in the loop!