Breaking Out of the Development Lull: The Results
We did it. Let's talk what we've learned.
A month ago, I said we’re in a “development lull” hell: despite everyone putting in the hours, we didn’t feel like the game was progressing. Our proposed solution was: Instead of keeping on building the game, we’re dedicating August to building a demo. An internal one, focused on the flow of action, and the minute-to-minute, […]
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Breaking Out of the Development Lull
Risking an internal demo at the cost of fundamentals
Every project I worked on suffered from what I personally call a development lull. When you start a project, things happen fast, you prototype like crazy and make decisions every day. When you finish the project, it’s mayhem, you almost lose control over your tasks. But somewhere in the middle, nothing happens for months, sometimes […]
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The Dark Souls of Shooters, Part 2
Let's talk gameplay
„Punishing difficulty”, says The Myth of Soulsbornes. “Prepare to die”. Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but finishing any Soulsborne can be done by any dedicated gamer. The games are indeed a bit on the hard core side, but they have nothing on the madness that were Spectrum and Commodore 64 games of the 1980s. One […]
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The Dark Souls of Shooters, Part 1
Which elements of Witchfire are inspired by From games?
„It’s like the Dark Souls of shooters” came up quite a few times already, and that’s kind of expected, considering we’re a dark fantasy game the creators of which both love and are inspired by Soulsbornes. But is Witchfire really going in that direction? Is making a Soulsborne shooter even possible? There are four major […]
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Why Prototyping is Important
And also why we stopped writing design docs
Not a big post or reveal but that’s kind of the point of this dev diary, with rare exceptions. So let me you show you how we dealt with one of the design issues this last week. Check out this video. Can you tell me what happened here? (You may want to turn on the […]
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Destiny's Influence on Witchfire
What elements of Witchfire are inspired by Destiny?
Many times when I am asked a design question by a programmer, my reply is: “See how Destiny does it.” This reached the point when this appeared on our team chat… People following the game have also noticed a lot of Destiny in Witchfire. Luckily, no one seems to have an issue with it… Comment […]
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Witchfire at Pixel Heaven 2019
Showing the gameplay at Warsaw's own retro/indie games festival
Last week we showed two minutes of Witchfire gameplay at Pixel Heaven 2019. We don’t have any plans to have a presence at any shows this year but we’ve made an exception for Pixel Heaven. Sure, it’s convenient, taking place here in Warsaw, but the real reason is that it’s truly a special thing. It’s […]
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Redesigning Weapons
From WW1 to dark fantasy
Missed the last entry due to national holidays but we’re back with another dear diary. A great thing happened that last week, though. Making Witchfire is super hard. It’s a project, uhm, quite big for a team this small. Painkiller was done, on average, by sixteen people: we started with eleven, but ended up with […]
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Snapshot: April 2019
Here’s what on our screens today: As always, my screen is email and playtests, but here’s something I needed to look at today: the concept art for the musketeer. The reason I had to check it out was to… …compare it to the in-game model. Any character in any video game has three forms: the […]
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