My inspiration, as well as the title, comes from the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns. It's about the futility of long-term plans as you can never plan for the things that will go wrong. It's better to roll with whatever comes.

I wanted to merge that philosophy with a turn-based stealth game, a genre that I very much enjoy but where the player often spends a detrimental amount of time in a planning phase trying to foresee every possible obstacle.

To create a faster-paced stealth game I made two iterations on the standard turn-based formula; the player's actions are stripped back to prevent overly complex planning, and the player acts simultaneously as the guard NPCs to minimize time between turns.

I pitched the game with an isometric camera in mind but no art style. Another game was pitched with a fable theme that the group were drawn to, so we merged the concepts together and landed on a flashy style with animal characters.

Best Laid Schemes was the class’ first group project at PlaygroundSquad. I had to find what type of workflow worked best for us even though most of us had not worked with each other before: I found it to be coming up with clear, mutual guidelines and then giving other developers time and space to create freely after those. This kept the creativity flowing through the project, and since we all worked around some common principles it was never too hard to forge the pieces into a whole.

I also handled the managerial side of the project, like managing scrum and sprint meetings, making sure people used the trello and miro boards, and I was in charge of the milestone presentations.

The core idea with Best Laid Schemes was a turn-based game where the chaos that emerges is fun rather than frustrating. I always kept this in mind during the development of the game, and was always cautious so that we didn't add mechanics that made the player want to control the chaos instead of going along with it.

To prevent the player from being stuck in the planning phase, I gave the player few mechanics to use and simple objectives; Reach the three switches in any order, then get the loot and head out.

We also wanted the player to not backtrack and instead go with whatever happens. Therefore we have no manual save system.

The squad that the player controls also works as a life system. Controlling three characters means that there is leeway for the player to complete the game even if they are caught twice. The amount of characters still in the team is weighed into a score at the end, encouraging the player to make it through the game without being spotted once.

I designed the menus and HUD to convey different feelings from one another. As the game has no save system, the main is effectively only reachable between plays. Due to this I wanted it to have the aesthetics of a heist being planned; incorporating things such as blueprints, boards and strings, and hastily drawn notes in manilla folders.

Since the main characters are professional heisters, I designed the HUD to look like a professional tool of the trade. Taking inspiration from a stopwatch, the HUD is sleek and symmetrical. The original design was made in silver, but as the level came further along we decided that it looked better if the HUD incorporated the color palette of the rest of the game.