Here's some stuff for people who want to dig deeper into the Mary's world & my development process.

I could have worked some of this stuff into the game (and maybe I still will someday) but it never crossed my mind that people would want (or care) to know about it. Maybe some of it will get into Mary's 2 (see previous post if you missed!)

Worldbuilding

In universe, Mary, Rascal, Scarlet, & friends are children's storybook characters. The arcade's parent company simply has a license from Mary's creators to bring the characters to life. That's where the old-timey designs and characterizations in the extras menu come from. Mary the character owns a bakery, not Mary the animatronic, etc. (Maybe the office posters are covers?)

Think of Mary & friends as modern day Beatrix Potter books, or like Avi's Poppy series. Or something in between.

Story clarifications

Some people were confused about me saying that the game has no lore. I guess I was wrong, since the whole "they're storybook characters" thing is technically lore. What I meant is that Mary's Arcade has a plot that doesn't depend on background information.

I'm no writer, but from what I understand, Lore is background information given during worldbuilding, and plot is the events of the story. Similar, but distinct.

Mary's lore is the aforementioned backstory about the book characters, which isn't even mentioned in game. It was just a thing in my head that helped me design the looks of the characters.

Mary's plot (SPOILERS) is about a bunch of robots malfunctioning and letting more characters out of storage, all leading up to a disastrous public debut.

I could have still told that story even without having any backstory about the characters, hence me calling it loreless.

Anyway, here's a tiny snippet from Mary's 2 that probably won't look anything like this in the final game as a reward for reading my rambling rant.