vnstudioelan

Witch You Want Postmortem

Added 2024-10-09 18:19:59 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone, Arimia speaking! As the director for Witch You Want, I wanted to give you some insight into how it was made and our thought process for creating it for today's Patreon post. Note: this will contain spoilers! If you haven't played it already, give it a try on itchio.

Witch You Want started from the very simple concept - I like witches. Growing up, I didn't care much for the antiquated overly scary witches, but rather those that were designed to be more beautiful (or at least, more realistic). I've always loved the thought of a magical character wearing flowing gowns, large hats and the like - not necessarily a magical girl, but rather someone who wasn't tied to superhero-esque duties. All of that's to say, I like witches.

I've always wanted to try my hand at making a customizable protagonist x love interest type of game, and making the player have to help a witch sounded like a great excuse for a plot. When caps and Theo pitched the idea of doing an internal game jam, I was excited, and refined this idea into something feasible for the time frame. We constrained the game to only take place over a single week with the only 2 characters shown being Mirabelle and the player character. Making sure the game could be finished in less than a month was my top priority while planning the game - after all, if it can't be done during the game jam, then it won't get done for the game jam.

Natasha offered to do the writing, so I'll let her talk for a bit on her process.

Hi, I'm Natasha, the writer of Witch You Want!
While I've helped out with a lot of projects as an editor and have made and directed my own games, this was my first time writing a full script for someone else's project. Writing a game without also having to program it was a nice change of pace. The Garden Variety jam happened shortly after another jam I participated in, Velox Fabula 2, which is ten days long with a required theme that's only announced when it starts; I led a team where I did both the writing and programming. After that, doing a month-long jam where I only had to write the script felt more like a vacation than anything else.
It helped a lot that the scope for WYW was always pretty narrowly defined: about a week of potionmaking, plus the intro and festival and descriptions for the ingredients. At least writing-wise, it wasn't at any real risk of ballooning completely out of control like a lot of projects do. I also wrote the "perfect" path first and left stuff like failed potions and the bad endings for later; the idea was that if I ended up being too busy or got sick then there would still be a complete game, but it would let you redo the potion indefinitely until you got the correct recipe.

The script ended up at around 13k words, give or take. You can't see it all in a single playthrough: I ended up writing two distinct 'paths' based on how well you do at the potion minigame. (There's also some other dialogue variations, but those don't affect the length nearly as much.) I thought it would make for a cute easter egg if getting the correct answer for every potion revealed an additional yuri subplot. (I heard you like yuri, so I put some yuri in your yuri, etc.) But the "easter egg" ended up being "half the game."

Arimia side note: Natasha wrote so many variations in the script, you won't be able to see them all even in 2 or maybe 3 playthroughs. A lot of the variations are small, one-off lines, while some are larger. I couldn't believe how many variations she was able to come up with in such a short amount of time!!

I've seen a few people discover both paths, but if you've only played the game once, I recommend trying a second playthrough! If you got a perfect streak the first time, try deliberately botching the first potion. If you missed any on your first try, reload so you can check out Sara and Lilian's story!
I originally had the idea that the potion recipes would be different across both paths too, but it turned out a lot more difficult than I expected for me to think up recipes that made sense with the ingredients and lore I'd given them. Adding more ingredients would have required the minigame screen to be completely redone in addition to adding more item art, so that wasn't an option. Eventually I decided to just save myself the stress and copy the recipes over.
Aside from doing the writing, I loved being able to see the progress made on other parts of the game too. Dani's designs for Mirabelle and the MC are all so cute, and Ari did a great job combining everything into a game we can all be proud of. I’ve been so glad to see everyone’s reaction to Mirabelle! I tried really hard to balance “you wouldn’t want Mirabelle as your RL boss” with “but she’s cute enough to want to date in a game” so it’s really satisfying to know that most players have enjoyed her.

Thank you Natasha for giving Mirabelle a written voice!! You can check out her other projects here.

As for the art of Witch You Want, we decided on a purple color scheme very early on. Something bright, fun, and whimsical. That's where Dani comes in, as the character artist! I'll let her explain their work process.

For the designs I was super happy to lean into such a whimsical girly look for Mirabelle. Looking through the inspiration images of Lolita/Victorian fashion, I knew I wanted to design something frilly and celestial with strong motifs. I also wanted to make sure that she looked outright elegant and charming, but have enough youthfulness in her design that you could understand her clumsy playful side too just by looking at her.

For the player character it was a challenge to figure out the pieces and layers since I had never made a character creator before, but it was fun to core options to showcase diversity in a limited set ! Since the player is just an apprentice, she does not have the elaborate star motifs of Mirabelle. The one star that she has is a name tag that was given to her, besides that she was designed to contrast but compliment our lead. Mirabelle has stars and vertical stripes, our MC has round/circles and diagonal stripes as their personal patterns. Both share frills and bows, and a statement color of pink!

Also fun fact, while Mirabelle is designed with a color palette I absolutely adore and use often, the player characters colors were difficult for me to figure out. I knew I wanted them to share some colors, but also stand distinctly apart from each other as well. Since Mirabelle is all cool tone I chose the muted reds to stand apart from her, but also to keep the attention on our lead with the brighter palette ! It wasn't until after the game jam concluded though that I realized her colors were an orange away from the lesbian pride flag HAHA

Look how cute they came out!! Thank you Dani for bringing them to life. If you want to check out more of their other works, you can see them here.

As for my part on the jam, I was the director but also the programmer. I was in charge of coming up with the idea and then putting it all together with the assets provided by Natasha and Dani.

While I am the lead marketer here at Élan, I develop my own visual novels by myself and have directed jam teams before in the past. Being a director sounds like you're the ideas guy, but it's much more involved than that - you have to be the one to make all of the decisions at every step of the way. How should the characters look? Do you go with design 1 or 2? What resolution does the game need to be at? How many poses & expressions will the character have? How big will the game be? If person y can only finish part of their work in the time, what will you do? We didn't have these kinds of roadbumps on this project thankfully, but it's something you have to be prepared to deal with as a director. You're not an ideas person - you're a people person.

However, I was also the programmer for Witch You Want, which means I got to assemble it! We decided pretty early on to go with speech bubbles, as they're fun to work with and give it a unique style.