The Witch and The Candy House
Delve into the world of Hansel and Gretel. You and your brother have ventured too deep into the forbidden forest, and it's getting dark. However, you both see it! The Candy House. Despite your protest, your brother Hansel sprints towards it, leaving you all alone. So you slowly crawl towards the house when suddenly, "AHHHHH" blurts out Hansel. It's coming from the Candy house. Now Gretel must venture into the Candy House to save her brother.
The Witch and The Candy House is a game I created over the span of 2 weeks for the IGU Winter Jam. It's a short and sweet stealth/puzzle game. The theme of the game jam was Candy.
Click the image on the left to view the Itch.io page for the game!
The Witch and The Candy House gameplay meshes together stealth and puzzle solving all in a unique candy house environment where the player must avoid the candy guards that patrol the floors, and then finally, face the Witch herself in her room! The graphics are a highlight of the game, with heavy inspiration from the PlayStation 1 era of games.
Contributions
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Level Design
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Created Art assets for the candy house
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World design/set dressing
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QA and bug fixing/tracking
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Created Cutscenes for the game
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Combined all elements of the game together
Level Design
For The Witch and the Candy House, I drafted five top-down level plans for each floor the player would explore. The plans included the outside of the house and each floor, alongside any important items that the player needed for the story. While normally I would improve over the rough draft, in this game jam we only had two weeks to finish the game, and I needed to create other game elements, so I did not return to improve over the rough draft.
Animation/cinematics
To add a little character to the game, I created multiple storybook cutscenes for the game using Blender. As the book and characters required no rigging, the animation was very easy to create and quickly edit inside DaVinci Resolve. I used music I previously made for a University project (you can find those tracks by clicking here or in my about me) and I recorded and edited all the voice lines using Audacity and FL Studio. Overall it was a fun experience creating an animation that I have never done before and I believe it gave a lot of character to the game.
Game script
The Witch and The Candy House (script)
This is the script for The Witch and The Candy House. It details different aspects of the game in a script. (click the image or here to view it)
Art Assets
Whilst I'm predominantly a designer/writer, I had the most skill in 3D art on my team, hence why I developed these assets. As the theme of the game jam was candy naturally there weren't many asset packs we could find that would fit the game, so all the major assets (the house, the guards, the candy items) had to be created by me. I created these assets in Blender. I kept them as low poly as possible to emulate the PS1 style of graphics, however, some of the set dressing assets I used from free asset packs I have accrued over the years. If I could go back and improve these assets, I would optimize them so much more as that was a big issue with the build.
Rationale
Why did I and my 3 other friends decide to participate in this game jam? Well, the main reason was for fun. We got away from the issue in the game developer job market, we took a break from other projects we were working on, and we created something unique that otherwise we wouldn't have. It was a fun way to challenge ourselves as game developers and remember the joy of game development amid our job search.
It was also a good project to include on our portfolios, tying up any loose ends and showing off more of our work and the skills we have.
What I learned?
This project was less to learn new skills, and more to reinforce the skills I already have. I improved my skills in world and level design, with this being one of the better environments and levels I have created. I improved my skills in animation and editing, brushed up on my skills in blueprinting, and overall improved as a developer. Whilst there were a lot of bugs on launch and many assets and features we wanted to include, for a 2-week game jam we all did an amazing job and I'm proud of what we achieved.