Little Goody Two Shoes is a horror narrative adventure game from Portugal-based game studio AstralShift and it was released yesterday for Steam (PC), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. We had the opportunity to interview Ebee, João, and Kira from the team and discuss how Little Goody Two Shoes came together, its genre blends, and inspirations.
AstralShift released Pocket Mirror a while ago – Little Goody Two Shoes is the second game from the studio. Could you elaborate on the similarities between the two games and how they might be connected? Or what learnings have you brought from creating Pocket Mirror to Little Goody Two Shoes?
Ebee: Both games are directly connected and take place in the same universe, with Little Goody Two Shoes being the prequel to Pocket Mirror! With that said, both games can be played and enjoyed by anyone as standalones.
The idea for Little Goody Two Shoes first came up during the development of Pocket Mirror back in 2016. We felt that by exploring Elise’s story we could better round out the events of the first game and give the narrative the closure that we felt it needed.
We learned a lot from making Pocket Mirror, yet the scope of the development process for Little Goody Two Shoes provided new and exciting challenges for us as we moved from the limitations of RPG Maker to Unity and had to learn a whole new skillset to work with this new engine.
All in all, Little Goody Two Shoes is considerably more straightforward with its narrative and themes and will give players a much more hands-on experience in the sense that the player’s choices have a direct impact not just on the final outcome of the story, but on their personal experience with the game!
I noticed there’s a variety of genres in Little Goody Two Shoes – horror, visual novel, survival, dating sim – how did the team make these different genres cohesively fit together?
Ebee: It was a challenge, to be entirely honest! We always knew where we wanted to go with the narrative and how we wanted to present it — having the game’s events take place over the course of a week, no combat mechanics in the dungeons, and the sapphic take on the dating-sim genre — but we can’t say it was easy to strike the desired balance between all those elements!
Little Goody Two Shoes’ in-game progression went through many changes and iterations until we reached the ideal framework to carry its narrative and make both its puzzle-solving and narrative-focused segments shine.
The most difficult part of juggling all these different genres together was definitely describing and categorizing the game itself. Is it an RPG? A visual novel? A dating-sim? A horror game? With resource and time management elements? All of the above!
What was the most challenging/rewarding part of developing Little Goody Two Shoes?
João: The most challenging part is planning content for the game because it needs to fulfill a bunch of requisites. Not only does it have to be fun, but every decision needs to tie in nicely with the rest of the game. Other elements such as time constraints, financial costs and working toward the intended public reception also add a certain level of pressure to the development process.
Considering all these factors, it was a huge undertaking, but absolutely essential to make sure we were happy with the final result!
At the same time, these challenges eventually become the most rewarding, and nothing beats the feeling you get when you’re finally able to sit back to play the game and you see how all the decisions made along the way make a coherent, fun game to play – that’s what makes the development process all worthwhile.
There is nothing better than that feeling of thinking “We made this, it looks and feels awesome, people are gonna love it!”.
Are there any particular pieces of pop culture and specific works that inspired Little Goody Two Shoes?
Kira: Visually, Little Goody Two Shoes takes inspiration from a lot of influential icons from the 90’s Japanese animation such as Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Slayers and Studio Ghibli!
This can be immediately seen in the art style and visual themes, which we meticulously worked on in order to ensure we could pay a proper and sincere homage to this time period of animation and the shoujo genre. But deeper still, these influences help us in shaping the way the characters behave, their unique quirks, and striking personalities!
Anime and manga weren’t our only points of reference, however, as we looked towards cinema a lot during the development process! Films like Hereditary, The Witch and Midsommar amaze us for their grounded, yet chilling narratives with a dreamlike quality, and this was something we wanted to evoke in Elise’s story.
All this of course with a little bit of magic!
What has it been like working with Square Enix Collective and where do you see the studio in the future and Little Goody Two Shoes post-launch?
João: Square Enix Collective has treated us very well! They were especially protective and considerate of our vision for the game and went out of their way not to interfere in the creative process and let us have complete control on production and game design. We are very thankful for that and believe Little Goody Two Shoes wouldn’t be what it is without their support.
Regarding the future of AstralShift — time will tell! We are a very diverse team with lots of ideas and can’t wait to get our hands in new innovative projects and share them with everyone.
