Unforetold: Witchstone News

Hello again, Adventurers,

Today, we’d like to share with you a sneak preview of the design for companions in Project Witchstone.

Companions are a staple of cRPGs. The majority of the most memorable characters in the history of the genre are companion characters. Our interactions with them are what we vividly remember from these games. We hope that this will also be the case in our twist on the conventional cRPG.

"Recruiting Companion"

In Witchstone, you can recruit up to three companions into your party. While we do have recommended companion characters, you are free to recruit anyone in the world. It doesn’t mean that everyone will gladly accept to join you though. Some will take a bit of convincing.

The people you recruit will become invaluable both in and outside combat. Of course, they are more than just tools - they are also distinct characters with their own motivations and personality, and can react accordingly. Let’s take a deeper look.

[h3]Controls and Interactions[/h3]
On command, companions perform various actions for you and, depending on their own abilities and traits, open up some possibilities that wouldn’t be otherwise available to you.

During combat, you control all their actions, including movement. As the leader of the pack in a dangerous situation, they will follow your instructions without question as it is a matter of survival.

Outside of combat, you can also can give them orders, including having them interact with various elements (traps, doors, people):

• Using any of their powers and abilities
  
• Using their skills, such as sneaking, lockpicking or disarming traps.
  
• Waiting for you at a specific location (useful to prepare an ambush, for example)
  
• Picking up or stealing items
  

"UI Mockup"

But that doesn’t mean they will do your bidding like mindless robots. As mentioned previously, our approach for companions is that they are distinct individuals, and not simply extensions of your own character. While you are their leader, they do not follow blindly.

Outside of combat, they may be reluctant to perform certain actions, if such actions go against their values or if they can lead to getting harmed or killed.

For example, a good-natured wizard will refuse to throw a fireball inside a tavern. Or a Blade Master with no knowledge of explosive devices won’t blindly agree to try to disarm a trap.

However, you can always convince them to follow your order. You may attempt to persuade them on why it’s important they comply, or you may be the kind of leader that uses intimidation and threats to make their followers bend to their will. Of course, how you treat your companions may affect your relationship with them over time.

"Companion refusing order"

[h3]Appreciation and Reactions[/h3]
Companions, like everyone in the game, also react to what you do. Depending on their own personality, they may approve of what you do, or go all the way to being appalled and leave the party. The aforementioned good-natured wizard would be strongly opposed to any harm done to civilians (should he, of course, actually witness you performing the deed!).

More than that, companions are active participants in your story. They may propose an approach to solve certain challenges or encourage you towards a certain goal. They will speak up but in the end, it is completely up to you if you want to heed their advice or do things your way.

"Want to talk icon"

Ultimately, how you treat your companions and depending on your actions, companions may evolve into unwavering allies, or sworn enemies that will actively try to stop you.

That’s all we have on companions for now. What do you think?
Let us know here or on our socials.

• https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame
• https://www.facebook.com/WitchstoneGame
• https://discord.gg/spearheadgames

Talk to you again next month!

-Spearhead Games Team

Greeting Adventurers,

It’s been a while since we last spoke to you all. First and foremost, we’d like to once again answer our most commonly asked question: Yes, Project Witchstone is very much still in development!

During our 2 years of almost complete silence, the team at Spearhead Games has been hard at work on the game, making sure you all get to experience a beautiful and groundbreaking cRPG. We decided that now’s a good time to finally show you all some of the progress made on Project Witchstone and some of the innovations we are bringing to the genre. As such, we will be releasing blog posts on a monthly basis.
For the first post of our return, we thought it would be good to remind you what Project Witchstone is all about.

[h2]Origins, Vision and Challenges[/h2]



A key inspiration for Witchstone was the experience of playing a tabletop RPG, where the possibilities of roleplaying characters seem limitless, the feeling that the story is impacted by your decisions and that you have meaningful agency with the game’s world and its characters (at least with a good game master ;) )

While Witchstone has the look and feel of a cRPG, we don’t see it as being a traditional cRPG. Through its underlying combination of narrative, faction and NPC systems, we’re building the game with freedom of choice at its core, where those choices can have meaningful impacts on the game’s world as well as the story of your character. Unlike most RPGs, no quest is mandatory, no character is essential, and no choice is either good or bad.

Whilst this goal will provide an incredible opportunity for players to shape endless new adventures, this also poses some challenges, mostly learned behaviors and expectations from traditional cRPGs.

In more traditional cRPGs you are traveling through predetermined paths. You’re guided on paths through the highs and lows and the story is paced to match it.

We’re trying to break this on-rails, pre-determined experience and enable true freedom: the ability to work towards your chosen goal in any way you see fit. With Witchstone, you can experience your own story and shape the world in your own way but still feel the depth and quality of that journey.



We want everyone’s journey and progress to their goal to be genuinely unique; however, we also need to ensure that the experience doesn’t feel directionless.

The key high-level goals we are striving for are:

Gameplay is never directed

• Witchstone is, fundamentally, still an RPG. We need to introduce the various systems including the features, and of course, the content to the player.
  
• We want the players to have an idea of what’s possible and what next steps they could accomplish towards their goal.
  
• That said, we also want to avoid leading and hand-holding the player too much and need to challenge some of the players’ learned behavior from playing other RPGs.

Every playthrough is unique

• A different outcome to what the player is expecting shouldn’t be considered a failure. Instead, it should be just another challenge or another way to achieve your chosen goal. This idea should shape the core of the unique, emergent journey each player will experience.

Please let us know in the comments what excites you the most about Project Witchstone.

And finally, we’d like to thank all of you who have stayed with us these past 2 years, even if we didn’t talk at all about the game. Your continued support and curiosity has meant so much to the team. We promise never to disappear like that again.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WitchstoneGame/
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1064120/Project_Witchstone/
Discord: https://discord.gg/spearheadgames

Talk to you again next month!

-Spearhead Games Team

🎺Adventurers!
Our monthly Dev Update is making a comeback, and we couldn't be more excited!

📅 When: Friday April 21st
📝 Blog topic: Game Overview (Origins, visions and challenges)
🎮 Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/spearheadgames

Hello adventurers⚔️

It's been a while since we made an update about our upcoming game Project Wichstone and want to take this opportunity to share more details. To ease any concerns, our team is still actively working on the game and the progress so far has been incredible!

As our team continues working hard on the development, we are also having important conversations around whether we should partner up with a publisher or if we should self-release. No matter our final decision, one thing is certain: the game is coming and it will be awesome!

Thank you everyone for your support & patience whilst we’re making Project Witchstone the best it can be. We look forward to fill you in on the details once we have everything all taken care of.

Stay tuned!
- Spearhead Games Team

Greetings Adventurers!

We have some exciting news about the future for Project Witchstone that we’ve been waiting to talk about until it was 100% locked in, and now that we have it all set in stone we can tell everyone about it. Originally when we came up with the idea for Witchstone we’d considered plans to run a Kickstarter as a way to generate the funding needed to develop the game. We’re a small studio, and while we’re lucky to have had success in the past with games like Stories and Omensight, funding the development of a game takes a lot more money than most would think, especially with a plan for a game that extends into multiple years of development.



Since Witchstone represented a step up from our previous work as far as scope and ambition, we knew we’d need to have a plan for any contingency, thus the original plan to Kickstart the game into Early Access while we worked on it further if that’s what it took to be funded. But as you know, Early Access development comes with its own challenges. As we worked further on the game we realized that it would likely be hard to deliver the quality we were aiming for while also having the ticking clock of making good on crowdfunding expectations as well as supporting public-facing Early Access updates. Over time we’d looked into some options of how we could not only continue development on the game without needing to crowdfund, but also in a way that would allow us to not have to scale back the planned game design, which would have been a major compromise from the original plan for the game.





We’re happy to be able to say that as of right now, Witchstone’s development is funded. We have the time and backing we need to fully finish the game, as we’d originally intended, without needing to make gameplay quality compromises to deliver by a date dictated by crowdfunding or early access concerns. This is such an exciting situation for us, and really a best case scenario for fans.

What exactly does this mean for Project Witchstone? Well first off it means that we’re able to go heads-down on development and really give our all to making Witchstone everything we know it can be. It also means that with the ability to pursue the full-scope version of the game that we’d always wanted to, we’re extending our development into the foreseeable future. As we get closer to major milestones, we hope to be able to talk about dates, but as of right now the timeline for development extends beyond 2021 at minimum.



It’s hard to exactly quantify the major changes this allows us to make, but it’s fair to say that the difference in what a player will receive as a finished game with this approach is going to be night and day. Without funding and extended deadlines, we were looking at a reduced experience if we were forced to release it on a shortened deadline. When you’re trying to tackle a new type of game as a studio, it can often be a bit of a learning curve internally with regards to how long you’re looking at for total development. In this case for us, as the game became more and more functional, we realized just how good it would be if we could take it all the way to it’s best version instead of looking for ways to speed up development.





We’re still planning to post updates online when we feel like we’ve got something cool to share, but with an extended timeline, we’re going to shift away from a regular post-plan so that we’re not borrowing time from development itself, as well as having to worry about showing off things that may later change, thus extending timelines even farther. For those of you interested in knowing what we’re up to, head over to our studio’s social media channels where we’re going to do our best to be a bit more active. Over the last year as we’ve been working from home and so focused on the project, we realized we wanted to still have a way to connect with fans, but it makes the most sense to centralize the efforts into one place for the time being so we can spend most of our time on the game development itself!

Spearhead Twitter: @SpearheadMtl
Spearhead Instagram: @SpearheadMtl
Spearhead Newsletter: Click here to subscribe

We appreciate all of your support over the years, and especially the fans who are excited for Project Witchstone. We know that waiting is always tough, but with this opportunity, we know we can deliver an experience that will have been worth the patience. We’d never be where we are without the fans, and so we’re working to say thank you the best way we can, by doing our absolute best work.

-Spearhead Games Team