Whimsical Witchery is an unreleased Crafting RPG set in the 17th-century of Scandinavia. The player picks up broom and brew as Amalia, a witch who recently returned home from her arcane studies at the witchcraft school of Blåkulla.
Specification: My Contributions: Tools:
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Studio: Arcscape
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Development time: 14 months
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Engine: Unity 2018
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Team size: 6
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1 Designer
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2 Programmers
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3 Artists
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Game design
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Level design & dressing
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Narrative design
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Scripting/Programming
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Cinematics
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VFX
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Project management
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Business development
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Marketing
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Public relations
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Unity 2018
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Autodesk Maya
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Adobe Photoshop
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Cinemachine
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Gaia Level Editor
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Microsoft Excel
Game Design
Whimsical focuses on explorative crafting mixed with a semi-open world approach to host the RPG elements. Dynamic crafting using different stations, combined with a traditional RPG-formula through quests, progressive narrative, enemy encounters and item collection.
Seeing as the crafting was going to be in focus, I began by researching games such as TES:Skyrim and World of Warcraft. In these games the player goes gathers everything from random scrap to rare ingredients. Then they stick to the crafting table for quite a while, while not really doing anything except pressing one button once or several times over. I wanted to make something that allowed you to experience more creation, with even more emphasis on the explorative side of the crafting. Therefore I developed a four-way crafting system:
First off there is the Cauldron. The player puts two ingredients into the cauldron, picks up the large wooden spoon and mixes away.
This is where the potions are created. The crafting system is based around combining two different ingredients. I wanted the ingredients to have some character so that the player would create a mental mapping of them during gameplay.
What I really wanted to avoid was the ingredient becoming "just another ore". For this purpose, we chose to have two slots for the cauldron; this allowed me to work more with fun ways to affect them through the other means. This created a type of development-tree for ingredients. Where they could be any of the following four types:
Powder, Goo, Enchanted, Raw.
Secondly we have the Bloodbath. For this I took a look at other RPGs; traditionally when you've been out in the world and you have 400 of item X, you can just press a button and it will be crafting automatically over a period of time. During which you get a bit of breathing space in the game. So the bloodbath is nothing other than a big barrel in which the player can stack an amount of items that will be processed over a time. After they have spent time in the barrel they become Goo, instead of Raw
Thirdly we have the Pestle & Mortar. This is a station where the player had to put in a bit of work, actually hammering down on the ingredients in order to make them into Powder. If a potion was brewed with powdered ingredients, it would gain a large Aoe.
Lastly we have the Magical infusor. Here the player would have to pay something to get something. Every ingredient in the game had some type of attribute that was specific for that ingredient. A Nypon berry had heat, for example. With the magical infusor the player could combine attributes with different ingredients. The hook is that they had to burn an amount of the same ingredient in order to infuse another. So, for example, if I wanted to infuse a crystal of ice with heat, I would have to burn atleast three Nypon berries. This was a station I had a lot of fun designing. It gave the player a new way of looking at the ingredients they already had experimented with. Sadly, it didn't make it too far into testing until we cancelled the game.
The Bloodbath mockup
Pestle & Mortar
Magical Infusor mockup
Level Design
The world of Whimsical Witchery was what we called semi-open. This meant that the player had open areas to explore to some limit. I re-iterated the world design three times in order to fit the game as the core was changed two times during development. The final idea was to have one main city hub in which the player could pick up, excecute and deliver quests. This would be Fyrehem, seen in the video below. Besides this there were three more areas of interest. The witch hut, the deep forest and the snowy mountians. The deep forest and the snowy mountains were the two explorative areas. Here the player could find all sorts of ingredients and whatnot. Then the witch hut, in which the player could brew all their potions.
In order to get the player to want to return to the exploration zones we had two "carrots". The first being that there were ingredients you couldn't access until a certain level. The second that the world itself would change two times due to the narrative beats. After a change, there would be harder enemy types, new ingredients and access to a new area in the zone.
This is what our quest loop looked like. I wanted to have quests actually affect the world after a player has completed them.
The example on the right is from our test world in which the player gathers Nypon berries to free a frozen goat, but accidentally sets it on fire.
Together with one of the programmers, we designed and created the quest-and-affect system. This would play a great deal in the coming level design challenges.
