Dev Blog #4 [Cal] - Character Design, Set Dressing, and UI

March 23

Hi, I’m Cal! I’m the Creative Director as well as an artist on The Witch’s Garden. I came up with the concept behind this game about two years ago while cultivating my own vegetable garden, and I’m so excited to see it coming to fruition.

Besides overseeing any big creative decisions, I’ve designed and done the portrait art for several characters, including several designs that didn't make it into the final game.

Nahriel, the Mayor, and Red. All character portraits use soft gradients and lines that vary in color.

The main character. We ended up going with the first design, but with the smaller wand of the third design as opposed to a larger staff.

One thing I spent a large amount of time on last semester was designing, modeling, and texturing the exterior of the witch's house.

One issue I ran into while designing the house was making it fit the theme of the game as well as the person living in it - I was focusing so much on making it odd and quirky that the first design I came up with was far too grandiose, when the idea was for the witch to live in a small, humble cottage.

I used Eleanore's original witch model as a reference for scale - they're a bit camera-shy, so they're not in these pictures.

Here is the house as we have it in the game now. The base house, wheelbarrow, and mailbox were made by me, the shingles on house were made by me and placed by Eleanore, and the ivy and window box flowers were made and placed by Eleanore.

More recently, I made two custom fonts to replace the default fonts and give the game experience a bit more of its own personality, and assembled the hybrid diagrams that will show up in the research book.

The first font is a version of my own handwriting. I had originally intended only to make the second font, but then I realized it might get a bit harder to read the smaller the text, so I made the first font for body text and the second for headings. I'm going to continue tweaking these in the coming days.

Hybrid diagrams

Thanks for reading, and make sure to check back in for future posts!