How the opening to Secret of the Monkey Island makes you fall in love with the game in three minutes, and how it inspired the design of Witchfire
Now that is a blog post title we never imagined writing...
Years ago, when making The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I wrote about game design, using both AAA and indie games as examples. One of the subjects I wrote about way more often that I remembered was game openings. For example, I criticized Bioshock Infinite for they way it opens, while expressing my love for the […]
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What is the Warning System and how does it work in Witchfire?
A visual feature that we don't want you to see
We asked you this: Reveal of features and candid devblog entries lead the pack, so let’s feature both today. If you follow Witchfire, you probably know the basics. It is a first person shooter with dark fantasy vibes. There are guns, there is magic, and there are undead swordsmen trying to kill you. But there […]
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Witchfire Summer Game Fest 2022 Trailer
Also, Epic Games Store and Early Access news!
Here’s a short and sweet FAQ on the Witchfire trailer featured at the Summer Game Fest 2022! Wait, what trailer? This trailer! We suggest watching it in glorious 4K. Is the Early Access version exclusive to the Epic Games Store? Yes. As some of you know, we’ve been working with Epic since 2007. It all […]
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A Date, a Feature, an Indie Drama and the Biggest Q&A Yet!
Also, images and videos from the yesterday's build
As promised last week… …here’s the update on Witchfire. We will discuss the release date, a certain core feature of the game, and the fandom. And then it’s time for a fat Q&A session, the biggest we’ve ever done. There are some juicy bits of info in that section, indeed. A ROGUELITE Armed with strange […]
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The Very First Witchfire Playtest
A couple of gamedev friends played the game and here's what we've learned.
A few days ago, we held the very first playtest of Witchfire. We invited a couple of industry friends – easier this way, they know what a work-in-progress build is and won’t be distracted by missing textures or placeholders sounds – to our studio to play the game for an hour or two. Does this […]
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New Witchfire screenshots, plus man plans, God laughs.
How to work hard for three months and have (almost) nothing to show for it!
The Witchfire development stories I post here follow a certain pattern, usually. We face a problem, we attack it, we solve it, boom, happy ending and we move on to the next step. Not this time. Get your “F” keys ready. At the end of the last diary entry I wrote: So we are moving […]
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Winter (Update) is Coming ...Right Now.
The one about the minute to minute gameplay experience.
I wrote this in the last devdiary entry: Right now, we’re working on a new, pretty challenging but super exciting milestone. We came up with the design for the core flow of the game (so it’s not about “30 seconds of fun”, but rather “30 minutes of fun”) and we’re prototyping that. Three months later, […]
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Witchfire Autumn 2020 Update – A Tale of Two Milestones
Ye olde trusted candid development report! With quotes! Okay, one quote.
Two important milestones behind us, one of which is a story of happiness, and the other a warning and a lesson. Going with the idea of altering between making systems and let’s have a new playable, after a few weeks of the former we’ve decided to make another internal demo. To be clear, it’s never […]
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Witchfire Development Update: Summer 2020
It's done when it's done but when is it done?
Playdead, a Danish game developer, released Limbo in 2010. It took them six years to make the next game, Inside. It’s been four years since then, and we still don’t even know the title of their next project. Frictional, a Swedish game developer, released Amnesia: Dark Descend in 2010. It took them five years to […]
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