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David H

Dev Blog #7 [David] - Wrapping Up Development

May 2

Hi! I'm David, one of the programmers on the team! It's finally May, which means development of The Witch's Garden is finally wrapping up. Unfortunately that means this will also be the final dev blog. I know they will be missed.


Stout Games Expo is tonight! SGX is an awesome event where we get to present our game to a ton of people who have probably never seen our game before. We'll have a booth set up where you can see concept and in-game art, talk with us more about the project, and play the game!! We would all love to see you there!


Of course, you can always download the game from our itch.io page if you can't make it.


Anyways, our development process is coming to an end. We started the ideation process back in September 2021, so it's been really cool to see the game become a tangible thing in the last handful of months. We also managed to avoid having to cut a ton of content for the final version of the game, which is awesome. In case you were curious where we started, here's what the absolute first version of the game looked like:

And yes, I did a lot of the scene arrangement there.


One of the cool systems I programmed recently was the tutorial system. We have a lot of unique things to interact with in the game, and a simple controls page just isn't enough to communicate that. We decided initially we could save some time by just having a text window pop up at the beginning or end of a day and just communicate some information there. That was easy enough to program, but playtesting showed that it was a lot of information to read all at once. Unfortunately, efforts to save work ended up causing more of it. Ugh.


I'm super happy with the state of the tutorial system now. Most of the information has been moved to where it's relevant, so for example you get a tutorial popup when you interact with the cauldron for the first time that tells you how to use it. One thing we noticed in playtesting was that players spent more time exploring the areas outside of the garden than we expected. We're targeting a shorter playtime for SGX, so I added a fence blocking off those areas in the early stages of the game that unlocks once the player completes their first potion request.


That's about it! It's been a great experience working on The Witch's Garden, and I hope you enjoy it!

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