Dev Blog #1: The Influence System
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 dialogue, planned questlines, 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 dialogue 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
Making it in Unreal: how Project Witchstone emulates the freedom of Dungeons and Dragons
Bottling the magic of pen and paper RPGs in digital form
Forged in the bubbling broth of a Divinity: Original Sin 2-esque cauldron, Spearhead Games’s Project Witchstone takes the tried and tested RPG formula and sprinkles more than a dash of AI on top to create a ‘living world’ RPG. The game is supposed to “capture the fun and freedom of a pen and paper RPG campaign” in a computer generated world, in the devs’ words.
To create this variable and responsive game world, careful AI craftsmanship is needed, and the Unreal Engine 4 makes the perfect toolkit for such a task.
Philip Tam, game designer and community manager at Spearhead Games, tells us that going with UE4 “was a no-brainer due to our long history with the engine.” The studio has been using it since its inception back in 2012, and “since moving over to UE4 for our first action RPG, Stories: The Path of Destinies, the programmers have been creating tools and features that can be carried over from game to game,” meaning they didn’t have to start from scratch for Project Witchstone. “The engine’s features and pipeline have become second nature to the team at this point,” he adds.
What sets Project Witchstone apart from other games in its genre is that aforementioned “living world” – an “alive” and “dynamic” world that you can interact with authentically and in which player decisions affect things down the line in a realistic way. “Like a Game Master running campaigns for their friends, our stories have a general direction, but what the player decides to do ultimately determines what happens next and which characters are involved.”
This dynamic world is captured in its setting. “When coming up with the lore,” Philip says, “we felt that the game’s core concepts of freedom of choice and influence on the world would need a setting that would support conflict, intrigue, and lasting changes. Therefore, the idea of a frontier-like world made the most sense to us. In the mythologies of the American West and the Australian Outback, the stories are about personal freedom, danger, one’s influence on society, resource control, the old vs the new, et cetera. This, combined with the visual iconography of the era, inspired and influenced us greatly.”
It’s not just about player agency, however. To make this experience as realistic as possible, non-player characters need to react authentically to the world – and act upon it, too. “Characters in the world of Project Witchstone go about their daily lives, react to characters and actions around them, but can also act on their wants and needs. For example, should the player attack someone in their vicinity, an NPC has to immediately decide, based on their personality and past history, whether they help someone in the fight, run away, or report the assault to the nearest law enforcement officer. As you can imagine, building such an AI and optimising it isn’t trivial.”
UE4 gives Spearhead Games the tools to tackle all this AI-heavy worldbuilding with relative ease – tools such as the engine’s built-in visual and auditory AI perception and debugging tools, which only needed a little tweaking to suit the game’s needs. Behaviour trees are also used to “determine which action a character decides to perform in a situation”, so that “whether they go about their day, resting at home or guarding a property, or participating in a raid to take over a property for their faction, everything is handled within the branches of the behaviour tree.”
Setting aside the game’s AI for a moment and looking at its design, “the main complexity,” Philip tells us, “comes from making a game with a systemic narrative. The stories aren’t generated by the computer as in a procedural game, therefore we need to create and adapt a lot of story content to reflect and accommodate the player’s actions and decisions.” The solution once again comes from UE4 – this time, its ability to import data sheets.
The ability to import data sheets “makes it so we can work quickly and collaboratively using spreadsheets and update them to the game when needed. For example, all of our dialogue lines, which are chosen dynamically based on the speaker’s traits, relationship with the player, and the state of the world, are written and stored as spreadsheets. The same goes for narrator and banter lines, as well as NPCs’ and factions’ reactions to events.”
This again goes to show the emphasis placed on a dynamic, interactive game. The systemic narrative calls for the creation of story content to match the player’s actions and decisions, and UE4 helps with this process via data sheets. And these actions and decisions, and how they play out in-game, are made authentic, interactive, and dynamic, offering players plenty of free choice in how they want to approach and play the game – UE4 helps create such player freedom with its AI toolkit.
What Spearhead Games has made with UE4 is a game that occurs in what feels like a living, rather than a static, world. This was a deliberate choice, aided by the studio’s familiarity with the Unreal Engine and the knowledge that it could be used to achieve the living world of Project Witchstone, and help out with some of the more nitty-gritty AI aspects of development. Capturing the “freedom of a pen and paper RPG campaign” is no small task, but UE4 makes that undertaking a little easier.
Visually the game looks like World of Warcraft to me.
Dev Blog #2: Companions vs Followers
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
Dev Blog Q&A #1: The Art of Project Witchstone
For this Dev Blog update, we wanted to do something a little different. So here's a Q&A with our artist Yan!
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!
@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
Dev Blog #3: The Future
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!
@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
Dev Blog #4: Funding Announcement!
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.
The Big News
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.
Updates Going Forward
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
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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
I checked the Steam page and couldn't find anything recent from them. However,
I checked the Steam page and couldn't find anything recent from them. However,
this at least means there is some hope that it is still alive and will see a release at some point, even if that hope still isn't strong, it is better than nothing
