“You play Duran, who wakes up in the woods with no trace of his memories. While trying to find your way back, you come across a strange mansion… Will you be able to decipher the witch’s secret and learn about your past?”
- Genre : adventure / horror
- Game time : 2 to 4 hours
- Language : French and english
- Engine : RPG Maker MV
About the game
A Witch’s Wish is a horror adventure game with puzzle elements. It is available free online. The game tells the story of Duran, who wakes up alone in the middle of the woods, with no memories. His path inevitably leads him to the same manor, in which lie the answers to his amnesia…
This project is a tribute to the indie game “The Witch’s House” created by Fummy in 2012.
Context
Most of the players who have tested this game are people I know, I’ve had a lot of fun sharing this ambitious project. I also learned a lot during the development phase, which took place over several sabbatical years, and in which I also worked in a supermarket. Combining these two jobs proved difficult at times, but I’m proud that I didn’t give up and work on the project through the end.
Although I created several prototypes that are now on a non-functional hard drive, this game was my first project to be realized and published online. During this period, I had two goals in mind:
- Create an immersive gaming experience through the world of a witch inside a manor. To put the player on a variety of puzzles, but also to let them experience scary moments with different monsters that inhabit the house. Telling a story, which is gradually revealed through the gameplay, was also something that was close to my heart to make.
- Trying to get noticed online by people in the video game industry. To this end, I created this game entirely on my own, with the help of RPG Maker MV. The elements that were designed by me include code, puzzle design, graphics, narrative design and sound design. The only elements that are not mine are various plugins used, and several pieces of music. Unfortunately, after the game was released on Steam, I was unable to make contact with anyone in the video game industry. However, it was a great experience.
My first step on pixel art
I set myself the challenge of doing all the graphics of the game myself. I started with Photoshop by learning about image retouching and content creation. Although this software isn’t designed for pixel art, it allowed me to give a first graphic iteration of my game through the placement of objects via a parralax (image used as background for the game zone).
I then practiced pixel art more effectively on Asesprite software, which was a great help for the rest of the production. When I published the game online, I also made available the graphics pack containing all the game sprites in .PNG format, as well as several sounds and music composed by my brother.
I hope this pack will be of use to future users !
Puzzles design
The game has several puzzles, most of which are based on the world in which the character finds himself, i.e. objects found in the environment help to solve passages, but some require more thought. Here’s an example with the ice pillar puzzle in this in-game screenshot:
The goal of this puzzle is to push ice pillars on slabs, positioned in precise locations. The ground is frozen, so that each pillar moves in a straight line towards a wall or obstacle. The puzzle is based on a 2D level design in which I had to determine the minimum number of tries to succeed, but also think about the potential soft-locks that a moving obstacle could cause.
I wish I could say that all the puzzles in the game had been put down on paper beforehand, but that’s not the case. There is one very (too) difficult puzzle, the one where you have to light all the tiles in a perimeter. The player is introduced by a pattern on the starting floor, then each time the character steps on a tile, that tile and adjacent tiles change state, lighting up or going out. This puzzle is one of the few where I first set out to code the mechanics of this game, so I had no solution to my own enigma.
However, there is a game mechanic that gives clues when the player is in difficulty. When the player interacts with a green pentacle to obtain a clue to the puzzle, a choice is offered to the player to solve it automatically. If there’s one thing I’d like to rework on this project, it’s this one puzzle !
Images
