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Quinn McDonnell - Systems Designer
Booklet's Big Story
Brief Intro
Booklet's Big Story is a narrative focused 3D platformers for ages 8 through 10. You play as Booklet, a little book in a magical library without a story, you are accompanied by the narrator who helps you go through different genres trying to help you, the player, find their story.
Booklet started development in September 2024 and releases on May 2nd, 2025
The Team was composed of 13 people including myself
My Roles
I was the Systems Designer and help conceptualize the main gameplay loop and game mechanics
I was the Lead Designer of the whole project and help manage all five designers including myself.
I was the Level Designer for the Fantasy Level of our game, creating the final version seen in our final build.
Making a Book Move
At the beginning it was my goal to create a platforming move-set around this book character we had created. And so I worked with the team to come up with some of the ideas. We needed the character to feel like a magical book. One idea I came up with was a glide. This was because a book held open looked almost like a glider. So I spent time prototyping the ability in engine and making it feel as nice as I possibly could.
The next major ability we developed was the flop ability. Since we needed a fun way to attack enemies we thought the idea of slamming down a heavy hard cover book would be a lot of fun. So we made a basic ability to flop down and create an area of effect damage area that could defeat enemies as well as activate buttons.
Genre Abilities
A big thing we wanted to sell with our game was the many abilities you would unlocked over the course of the adventure. We planned a total of four abilities before having to cut back to three.
Fantasy gave you a charge ability where holding down a button and releasing would have you rocket forward
Sci Fi gave you the ability to move platforms when you connected with a terminal
Noire gave you a saxophone that shoots music notes to distract nearby enemies.
Key Art of the Three Abilities made by Animator Artist Alec Ortiz
The Difficulties of the Abilities
Making the many abilities often lead to us having to cutback. We only had so much time and so many artists to make the abilities we wanted so we had to be smart. The charge took up our focus when we were still waiting for greenlight. But we had to make two new abilities within a 12 week timeframe. So with the designers we had to see what our artists could and could not do.
With sci fi, we had to make something easy to use and not hard to program and we had the idea of moving platforms, slightly inspired by the gyro-puzzles from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild as we would change the player's perspective to focus on the platform and have the challenge lie in trying to figure out where to place it. We had to make tweaks but overall is was a very effective idea as it took a single two week sprint to program and implement.
As for the Noire, we had a lot of challenge trying to come up with an idea. But we thought given the jazzy aesthetics we were leaning in we could make a music ability. This proved challenging as our character rig was not the most optimized for this idea and we would have to update the AI behaviors. So we kept it to a simple enemy distract ability and instead of building a lot of stuff into the ability itself, we modified already existing stuff to work with it which weirdly help keep the load down.
So a lot was learned from this experience, that sometimes the key is not to have deep mechanics but to have simple mechanics that are supported by a lot of simple external systems.
Fantasy Level Design
I was the key level designer for the fantasy level of the game. We had an initial design of the level that while good was too big and too empty. So my goal was to condense as much of the level as I possibly could. I came up with the idea of putting three golden pages to collect around the center point of the map, the big tower. This way you always knew where you would go after collecting the three pages. I put the three pages at differing heights and made the first cutscene cut to the lowest and go to the next highest one to create a nice visual hierarchy. Through testing I tightened the platforming to be inline with the changes being made to our character controller and then sharpened down the experience to an easy but good test of the controls for players to prepare them for the next stages.
Fantasy Level in December 2024
Fantasy Level in March 2025
What I Learned
Overall I learned a lot from this process. I learned an important lesson in system design. It is okay to have simple not complex. Our game needed a gameplay that would help drive the player's narrative experience, they were playing our game to go through the story not to do some insane "360 no scope" style of platforming. So I learned to be more relaxed about it and create the systems. This did not mean complacency with barebone mechanics but rather making mechanics that served the one function they needed too and not needing to make one thing have twenty five different features. And as a designer I learned to work with those who much different styles of design compared to my own and learning when to stand up for my own designs as well as taking suggestions to make improvements and release a quality product.
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