[Background Blog] The Early Design of “Beek 2”

Hey all! Today we’re going to be taking an early look at the design plan for our upcoming side project, i.e. the sequel to our short story Beek - Familiar Spirit. Since our team is currently in full production on Nekojishi: Lin & Partners and Astatos this project is sort of on the back-burner, but we thought it would be interesting to write about the early design ideas and prototype of the game.

Coming off the first Beek we realised there was a lot of things we could do to improve the game and create something a bit more satisfying in a sequel. (And with new experience on our side we can improve the technical aspects of the game)

So the concept of Beek was that the story set entirely within a text messaging app, with the player conversing with another character to advance the story. Initial designs for the game pushed the real-time aspects really heavily, as in opportunities to respond to Beek would elapse in real-time. But as development progressed we realised this wasn’t as practical as we would’ve hoped.

Some of our initial plans to improved this was to dynamically adjust the timing of the game to fit your estimated schedule, but it turned out the backend system wasn’t flexible enough as it was designed to fit the scope of the original fully real-time design. (Changing it would require re-programming over half the game and we were less than a month from release at the time)

So as a compromise we put in place changes to the system, such as response progression pausing when you’re not playing, and the timer bar until the decision times out to give more feedback about the nature to how time progresses.

The Design of Beek 2

That brings us to the last few months of 2019, we were beginning work on Astatos, and preparing for the announcement of Nekojishi: Lin & Partners when designs were being made for Beek 2. We realised we had to make Beek 2 a sort of evolution from the fist game while keeping a familiar presence to the first game.

While we don’t want to give out any story spoilers, the main design concept for Beek 2 is that it’s set within a Twitter style social media app where different characters post, reply, and repost messages and the player can interact with those.

As for the evolution of the real-time aspects of the original game, we flipped the system so time advances directly as the player performs actions. So in this case events will trigger in real time in response to the player’s actions, i.e. a “game time” that’s more condensed than real life. While there’ll be points in the story where the player can’t advance until a certain amount of time has passed in real life, for the most part the player will be able to play at their own pace in “game time”.

While we’re currently only at the early prototype and scenario drafting stage for this project we still have a little bit we can show you. Below is a screen from our current functional prototype showing the main timeline and posts. (NB: This is an early prototype without any UI passes by our designer or real story content and is only designed to demonstrate the function of the backend systems.)

And now we couldn’t forget the artwork! While we shouldn’t show any finished work until closer to the completion of the project, we thought it would be cool to share an early sketch of one of the currently completed CG’s… I wonder who those two could be? 

Conclusion

And that’s all we have to share about our design progress on Beek 2 for now. As it’s a side project, we don’t expect to be able to share any more about the game for some time, but we hope you enjoyed this early look into the design process. Let us know what you think!

- Studio Klondike