Unforetold: Witchstone News

Hey Adventurers,

Happy Holidays from everyone here at Spearhead Games! For the last few months in particular we’ve been making some great strides on development for Witchstone, so for this dev blog we wanted to give some updates about the state of the project, and what our plans for the near future look like. It felt like a good way to wrap up the year before we roll into 2021.

So what’s new? While it’s not finalized, we’ve made major updates to the UI, added new dialog sub-systems that allow a player to use their insight skill to gain ...well insight… into NPC’s motivations and desires, and generally added a lot polish to the functions that underpin the Influence System. Since a large part of the game’s design revolves around interactions created and moved forward by the Influence System, planning out the many modular events and independent NPCs that bump into each other as a result of your actions is where a lot of the dev time goes.



What Happened to the Kickstarter campaign?

We’ve had some fans also ask about the state of a Kickstarter, and we realized it would be helpful to give an update somewhere concrete here since other people are probably interested in the answer we’ve landed on. A Kickstarter is still being considered. But right now it’s not something we can put a time frame on because we’re actively exploring opportunities that allow us to extend our development time further, which would greatly boost the quality of the game.

On our end, this is a really good thing, but understandably when you’re excited and waiting on a game it could be frustrating news. Sorry about that, but we just want to make sure that as much as possible we make a great game, and there’s plenty of good examples of where taking a bit longer instead of rushing to finish results in a game not living up to its potential, and we’re not about that. We will make an announcement about crowdfunding once we know for sure one way or another, when we’re absolutely locked in on the future. As of now we’re focused on development, and deciding where it’s going to lead.



What about DEV BLOGS?!

We hope you’ve been enjoying these updates, and we plan to keep them rolling out monthly, and on occasion when possible maybe an extra one here and there. When we asked what aspects of the game people were interested in as a future topic, one of the most common answers was the combat system, so that’s right at the top of the list for upcoming Dev Blogs. We also want to do more Q&A blogs with the team, if you haven’t checked out the first Q&A with our art director Yan, it goes into all the inspiration behind the look of the game. We want to also get Q&A’s from teams whose work isn’t as often highlighted, but is crucial to what makes Witchstone tick. The plan for the next Q&A is to talk with the engineering team and get some specific insight into the actual nuts and bolts of how Witchstone handles things like dynamic storyline and branching narrative on the back end of the game.



Steam Page Updates!

We realized that the state of the game has come a long way from the current set of assets on the Steam page, so the very first thing we tackle will be updating the Steam page with a new set of assets that much better show where we’re at. It’s exciting to see the progress, and we want to make sure we’re putting our best foot forward for those of you who are just now possibly seeing the game for the first time.



We’d also love more feedback about what Dev Blogs you’d like to see, we keep a list of topics we think would be interesting, but also keep an eye out for what the community wants, because ultimately these posts are a way to talk about our game so that you get a feel for what our plans and ambitions for the project are. Knowing what about Witchstone excites you the most is exactly what we’d love to know so we can share that information with our followers.

The team is about to take a well-deserved winter break after a few extra-productive months, so we’re excited to return at the beginning of the year with new updates, new dev blogs, Steam page updates and more.

As always, If you’re interested in supporting the game right now, adding us to your Steam wishlist goes a long way to help us!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or anything at all. You can get a hold of the team by following the game on Twitter! https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame

If you’d like to be a member of the community, join our Discord: https://discord.gg/spearheadgames

If you want to be notified when we send out the newsletter with info about the studio, and general updates you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dilhNP

Until Next Year Adventurers!
-The Spearhead Team

For this Dev Blog update, we wanted to do something a little different, and give you a more one-on-one insight into a specific part of our work on Witchstone. We found some time to drag our artist Yan away and grill him with a ton of questions about the game for your amusement.

So here it is: A Q&A with Yan about The Art of Witchstone

Q: When the team started working on Witchstone, what did you draw inspiration from when designing the look of Witchstone?

Yan: We wanted to try something new that would be a bit more grounded but still rooted in what we do best. Our original inspiration for the design came from the Eberron campaign setting. We really liked that crazy mix of fantasy and technology, the large continent that houses a plethora of different cultures and influences, the old contrasting the new, etc. We wanted the kind of world that fantasy fans could relate to, but with something that hasn’t been done to death.



Q: Was there anything about the art style you intentionally did to make it unique, and stand out from other games that may look similar?

Yan: It’s still work in progress, but we’re trying to go for something that’s neither cartoonish, nor realistic. We’re going for something a bit more ‘painterly’ and grounded, but more on the ‘expressive’ side of things. We think it’ll make the game really shine, because it forces us to think of the content and the execution at each step, rather than simply sit on bold but early artistic decisions.





Q: What was the motivation for the changes from the more graphic art style and anthropomorphic animals that were such a big part of Stories and Omensight?

Yan: It (the anthropomorphic designs) just didn’t feel like the right approach for this game. When I think ‘fantasy sandbox’, I don’t immediately think of Stories or Omensight - those games were meant to be different. For those games, we wanted them to feel like unique, singular experiences and play around with different ideas, so we picked art styles that felt right for that. Their production cycles themselves were very chaotic and more free-form.

With Witchstone we’re much more deliberate and focused: we want something that people can at once feel familiar with so we can then bring them something new and ambitious wrapped inside that familiarity. We felt we have what it takes to surprise players and craft something solid - and anyway we needed something we could challenge ourselves with, all while still having fun. It’s like they say: no fun for the makers, no fun for the players (actually that’s a writer’s quote or something…). [Editor’s Note, It’s from Robyn Smart!]



Q: What’s one source of inspiration for the game you have that it’s unlikely anyone would guess?

Yan: Definitely Eberron. Lots of Wayne Reynolds influences came at first, and then additionally from games like Diablo 3 and BattleChasers: Nightwar. Later came the idea to make it a bit more based on the concept of a ‘frontier world’, so stuff like Dinotopia, Once Upon a Time in the West, Nausicaä. League of Legends is part of the mix often, along with a mountain of concept art references from all over.



Q: For you personally, what games do you really love art design of? Anything recent that really stands out for you?

Yan: Off the top of my head: Dark Souls (big Souls fan), Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Hades, Hollow Knight, Cuphead. I think that Return of the Obra Dinn and World of Horror deserve mentions if you’re into that old early PC/Mac game aesthetics.

Q from Twitter:
The game seems to have some of that clayish look that became popular around 2013. It's not hard to optimize, is it? (I think he’s asking if part of why it looks the way it looks is a concession to optimization mostly.)

Yan: Style is always work in progress, and every project I’ve been on has had its own necessary concessions, especially Stories and Omensight. One thing that I’ve learned over time is to be careful with bold artistic decisions, because sometimes they can be so strong that they’ll overwhelm everything else and become sort of a crutch. Also, going toe-to-toe with other, bigger and richer studios didn’t seem like a smart choice for us. It’s never been what we’re good at, hence why we’re searching for the path that is all our own.



Want more Q&A’s with the team? Have a specific idea for a Dev Blog? Leave us a comment, send us a tweet, tie some parchment to a carrier pigeon. We want to know.

If you’re interested in supporting the game right now, adding us to your wishlist goes a long way to help us!

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or anything at all. You can get a hold of the team by following the game on Twitter! https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame

If you want to be notified when we send out the newsletter with info about the studio, and general updates you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dilhNP

Until next we meet Adventurers!
-The Spearhead Team

Greetings Adventurers!

Welcome back to the Dev Blog for Witchstone. In a series of regular posts, we’re gonna dive into the cool features of the game that we’re working on to make it a new kind of RPG experience. The very first one is an interesting addition to a well loved system…

Companions… and Followers!

While having companions to your main character is a long-time staple of many (honestly most!) cRPG’s, we’re using one of the options of the Influence System we’ve built the core mechanics of the game around to give you even more options when it comes to who you can have following you around.

Companions, in the normal sense, will be available to the player at various points and locations around the world. Because the nature of how each playthrough of Witchstone is wildly variable subject to choices the player makes, there will always be variance in which companions you’ll meet along your travels. Among these we plan to have an interesting cast of characters that cover various tactical roles, personalities, and interesting interactions with the world as a whole when they become members of your party. While companions are more likely to stick around through thick and thin, you still need to be aware that they have a mind of their own, and while you do control them directly as a member of the party, their goals and wishes are still there, and their willingness to stick around can be affected by the player’s decision to either address or ignore them.



Where we get to do something new and interesting is the inclusion of the ability to convince NPCs to follow you around by using the Influence System. The method you chose to employ is up to you, be it through persuasion, intimidation, or some other method, but a successful attempt will see that NPC willing to tag along with you for the time being. This NPC is still an independent thinker, unlike the companion members of your party who generally will be yours to control, so you may find yourself in some interesting situations if you have followers along while engaging in something they’re opposed to. The autonomy that all of the NPC’s in the game have still applies to followers you’ve convinced to come along, so you’ll always have to be aware of your actions and the dispositions of anyone you have following the party to avoid (or even encourage) unforeseen outcomes.



One interesting use of the follower system that opens up a lot of possibilities for being able to physically bring NPCs to new locations their AI wouldn’t normally bring them to, but their presence can create emergent events. Want the sheriff to come check out the nearby smuggler’s hideout? If you can convince him to tag along, you can make it happen even if there isn’t a scripted quest that would take the Sheriff there normally. Bringing certain NPCs into areas that create conflict is an obvious use, but on the flip side, inventive use of the follower system may lead to peaceful resolutions that aren’t immediately obvious as well. Programming this level of reactivity into the systems is obviously challenging, but we think it’s an important aspect of the “living word” feel of Witchstone. We hope its inclusion in the wider toolset we’re trying to give players will create more interesting events and effects that step outside the traditional model of RPG design.



If you feel like recruiting every guard you can see so you can run around town in a big gang? Yeah, you can do that too.



….though bringing them all into a restricted area, was probably a bad idea.

If you’re interested in supporting the game right now, adding us to your wishlist goes a long way to help us!

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or anything at all. You can get a hold of the team by following the game on Twitter! https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame

If you want to be notified when we send out the newsletter with info about the studio, and general updates you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dilhNP

Until next we meet Adventurers!
-The Spearhead Team

Greetings Adventurers!

We have so many topics to discuss in the upcoming dev-blogs, but as they were being planned, we realized there’s a big, important, central thing that comes up so often that it only makes sense to make that the subject of the first one! That’s the Influence System.

With Witchstone, we want to give the player a lot more choice than other games do, and make those choices matter more to the overall world you’re playing in than you’ve seen in other RPGs before. A central way we’re doing this is through the integration of what we call the Influence System.



Above you can see a more traditional skill use prompt, which will exist in Witchstone to be sure, but what we’re building allows players to go beyond. Simply put, the Influence System is a large collection of options that can be used to influence people and events outside of scripted dialog, planned quest lines, and predetermined interactions in the game. Having the skills you’ve developed or chosen play a part in interactions is a common use of that mechanic in other games, but what we’re doing is designing it so that instead of only waiting for a dialog prompt or a pre-designed puzzle that tells you when a skill is relevant, we allow you to use those skills at any time, in any conversation, in whatever way you can think to combine them.



The concept of the Influence System will seem familiar to anyone who has played a tabletop RPG, as well as anyone who’s played a game such as the Fallout series, where various dialog options are gated behind a skill barrier. What we wanted to do is give the player more opportunities to use these skills, because one of the inspirations for Witchstone was the desire to give more agency in a wider range of situations. This goal is a direct result of having played a lot of the games that use skill-gated dialog systems and finding to our frustration that the number of times each skill would be relevant was so dependent on the choices made when designing the storyline of the game that it could feel stifling. We wanted to see how a game would play where more events were a result of previous player choices, or really anything outside of the pre-designed game path driving events than we had found in other games.

Want to try to persuade a bandit to give up and leave mid-combat? You can try. Assuming you’ve got the skills and a little bit of luck, you might even succeed. Want to convince the town guard to follow you to the location where you know those bandits are waiting? Decide how you’d approach it, and roll the dice. It’s totally possible to use the Influence System to create situations of your own devising that short-circuit, or even entirely change any sort of pre-planned quest or event and that’s by design. The idea of player agency over-ruling the “plan” is a time-honored tradition in tabletop RPGs that we wanted to bring to the electronic experience.



Beyond simply using things like persuasion or intimidation to influence behavior of the NPCs in the game, the toolbox provided by the Influence System will allow you to have a wide array of options when tackling any interactions in the game. The list in the screenshot above isn’t by any means exhaustive, but a good peak at the range of commands available through Influence. Creating emergent gameplay has many facets, but merely designing a game that throws randomized situations at a player wouldn’t achieve what we’re working towards. What we want is an experience where the player feels in control of their choices in vastly more situations than before, making each interaction a choice-point instead of hoping there’s a predetermined option that will maybe let your play style shine.

As we’re working on the game, the true power of the Influence Systems on the changeable, dynamic story of Witchstone itself becomes even more clear, and we’re very excited about how much variability it opens up. In a future dev-blog we’ll definitely come back to the Influence System to talk more in depth about it as we get even farther along in the development because it has so many parts, it would be impossible to really do it justice in a single post. This is just a quick taste of one of the ways we’re hoping to make Witchstone something fresh and new while still being fun for players looking for that traditional RPG experience.

If you’re interested in supporting the game right now, adding us to your wishlist goes a long way to help us!

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback so consider following the game on Twitter! https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame

If you want to be notified when we send out the newsletter with info about the studio, and general updates you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dilhNP

Until next we meet Adventurers!

-The Spearhead Team

Greetings Adventurers,

Grab a seat at the tavern, and let us tell you a tale… of Witchstone.



Witchstone is our upcoming living-world sandbox RPG, designed to take inspiration from both great cRPG’s of the past, as well as traditional Tabletop RPGs, and meld it together with our unique approach to story design and player control.

We’re using an approach to the story design of Witchstone that will put you, the player in control of the world itself in a way that hasn’t been done before. Each choice will ripple forward into both planned and unplanned consequences and outcomes. This dynamic system means that it’s truly up to you how you play, able to branch out farther than simple quest-lines would allow.

Additionally, we’re creating a deep selection of options that you can choose to use at any time to change the outcome of an interaction, even in combat. We call this, the Influence System, and we’ll get into it in deeper detail soon!



As we’ve been working away at the game, fans online have asked how the progress is coming along and for more details about the game, so we decided the best way to keep people informed was a series of Dev Blog updates that let us highlight parts of the game we think will give you a feel for what we’re working on.

If you have a moment to wishlist the game, it pleases the arcane and complex Steam Algorithm and is really helpful!

Sign up for our newsletter, and you’ll get all the updates about Witchstone as we work: http://eepurl.com/dilhNP

If you want to chat with the devs or ask a question, follow our Twitter and join the Discord!
Witchstone Twitter: https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame
Spearhead Games Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpearheadMtl
Spearhead Discord: http://discord.gg/spearheadgames

- The Spearhead Team