Cutie Story

Story

Introduction

Mommy wants to bake a strawberry pie. She asks Cutie to go out and fetch as much Strawberries as they can find, and a few Fluffberries, for added flavour.

Boing Country

Boing country is filled with lots and lots of Strawberries, but only 2 Fluffberries.

Cutie meets their sister at the end of the level, and she tells them that 2 Fluffberries is clearly not enough for a juicy and tasty Strawberry pie. There is probably more on PomPunn Island.

PomPunn Island

On PomPunn Island, Cutie meets Baba PomPunn: she is an old lady and seems tired. She tells Cutie that she has a fluffberry for them, and that she would like to rest today. Cutie then goes into the mines to collect Charchau and Polyploop for her. When Cutie comes back, Baba has passed away, living her promised fluffberry.

Nana PomPunn, the wife of Baba, asks why you simply do not buy canned fluffberry.

FeerFork City

In FeerFork City, Cutie explores the factory floor, where trees are cut into pieces, grinded and shredded, mostly for fire.

Polyploop and Charchau is turned into cans, fake flavour creams, and horrible foods.

Cutie find themselves in a steampunk greenhouse in which the last fluffberries trees are being cut down. They jump up the branches to collect the last fresh fluffberries'.

In the end, once at the top of the greenhouse Lady Jam asks what your doing here and just simply sends you home.

Epilogue

Once back in Boing Country, Cutie finds Mommy who understand the situation of the last fluffberry trees.

Then, she bakes a strawberry pie and plants the fluffberries in the garden to get some new trees, instead of putting them in the pie.

Values

At laei games, we make games for human beings. That means that we don't subscribe to the Manicheaen view that a game needs enemies to kill or destroy in order to be fun.

For the little ones

We tend to tell kids Disney style fairytales, where everything's fine, and in the end, everything's fine.

I'm more of a Miyazaki / Perrault / Grimm kind of fairytale guy. Complexity can be good for a child's development.

It doesn't prevent us from getting an happy ending, but along the way, let's be honest and frontal with the children, especially about the problem of industry.

Girl (and non-binary) Power

As a video game, I chose to make my characters either non-binary or female. First, female are overly under represented as playable characters in video games and I wouldn't want to misrepresent anyone. The fact that Cutie does not have a gender per-say give the player more opportunity to identify with them.

Notes

Yes, Cutie is a non-binary character... and yes, all the other characters are female, so?