Hey, everyone! I'm Mauricio, Game/Level Designer at Slingshot Studios. While we are a team of 6 hard working people, today, I would like to talk about how the pitch for "To Save a Toy". I think this will be a very cool practice since all fo us are working on it now and, as part of a Post Mortem, see how this project evolved through production.

Since I was a child, I have always had a passion and love for toys, the way they work, how they look... I've always said it myself, if I wasn't a game designer I would be designing and creating toys or working on the film industry.  It wasn't until I studied Interactive Design that I started to get a grasp of how I could fuse my passions into one, since designing is making the product, since its concept, for the user.

This new way of thinking allowed me to see two things that were very important in the idea:

1.- The theme suggested something approachable by everyone, that means KIDS TOO! That means, this game shouldn't be hard to play or take a huge learning curve to get into.

2.-  Toys have game/level design in their DNA. When a kid plays with a toy, the child grabs other toys, cardboard boxes, cups, bottles, shoes… whatever is in front of him or her and builds a world for the toy to go on an adventure, either that’s drinking Darjeeling with Marie Antoinette and her little sister or being a space ranger and saving the whole galaxy. If you think about it, kids build levels for them to experience with their toys. I mean, that’s even encouraged by Hot Wheels. That’s the selling point.

That started getting me very excited about this, but I still needed a genre that made sense for it. Sure, this is not the first game about toys ever, right? There are games about Toy Story or the Lego games, but they all are inclined towards a platforming genre which, to me, feels a little unnatural when thinking about toys. I'm pretty sure everyone has thought, what do toys do when you're not around? (I mean, there are four movies and many shorts based on that idea, right?) With that in mind I made a setting, what would happen if I place a toy in a stranger's house? And the answer was: SNEAK AROUND! Which sounds pretty obvious right now but, trust me, it wasn't that easy to think about it. The Toy Story movie franchise has 4 films about that specific topic and none of the games are about that. With this in mind, the genre was set in stone, this was a stealth game.

With all that, the pitch was pretty straight forward to do. This was going to be  a Dynamic Angle General View Third Person Camera about a woodland archer toy that should focus on easy to learn mechanics, which made a lot of sense since stealth games are, usually, very hard to get into since they rely on different mechanics and verbs to be used in a very tense environment, so the focus should go to that, making it as approachable as we can with it still belonging to this genre.

In the end, I can't believed that I found a team that shared this passion with me. Though the journey to this point has been hard, I'm glad this idea was able to resonate with my teammates and everyone has been a crucial part of what the game is becoming. This idea has turned into a full fledged project that everyone has pured their souls into. It is way better right now than anything I could've thoughtof myself  because of them. This idea turned into our project. I want to thank the team for believing in this idea, for adopting it and making it theirs too.

Yes, you can say we are playing with toys through development, but we are designing with them too, meaning the game is being tailored for you at every step of development so you, the player, can enjoy it fully. Thank you for reading this.

- Mauricio