When We Made... A Little to the Left
Max Inferno released A Little to the Left late last year, and artist, designer and company co-founder Annie Macmillan told Vince Pavey all about their work on the cosy puzzle game that has you sort, stack, and organise household items
fter a relatively short time in development compared to most video games (a testament to organisational efficiency based on the puzzles in the game, we’re sure), A Little to the Left is a game that first released and took a lot of people by surprise in November last year as it appeared only a day apart on PC and the Nintendo Switch.
A
Based in Nova Scotia, Max Inferno was set up in 2021 by Annie Macmillan and Lukas Steinman
The game maintains a charming art style that reminds us of the opening title sequence to the 1960’s American sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, while the core concept takes the grim chore of cleaning and organising a home and instead makes it both fun and an exercise in being mindful. Quite simply, there’s very little like A Little to the Left out there on the market right now. But how does the idea for a puzzle game based on simple object placement
52 | MCV/DEVELOP January 2023
even come about in the first place? “The concept for A Little to the Left first came to us during the GMTK game jam in 2020, and was inspired by the theme ‘out of control”’ said Max Inferno artist and co-founder Annie Macmillan. “We immediately thought of someone trying to cope with the feeling of being out of control, by turning their focus to the minutiae of their home. We imagined someone straightening picture frames, lining up pencils, and rotating cans so they all faced the same way. We based a lot of the behaviour and objects that you encounter in the game on our own tendencies and objects in our home.” Once the game jam project had
proven to be a success, it wasn’t long before the decision was made to turn it into what we now know as A Little to the Left. The small team also soon
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