Hello stranger

Hey, you! Yeah, the one that decided to read this devlog! Before anything I wanted to thank you for coming here. It's just the start of my journey but I'm already having a lot of fun with it, so I hope you can enjoy the ideas I'm coming up with for this game and maybe even play it when it's realeased!

The Game:

Once Upon a Witch is a Match-3 Puzzle game that is Action paced. You'll choose a character from a cast of Witches that have their own spell knowledge and abilities, and perform magic (in a Match-3 fashion) to boost your score and defeat your enemies.
Each character have their own playstyle, wich includes different ways to interact with the elements and different spells and strategies.

Inspirations:

When I was a child I had a Super Nintendo. And on that Nintendo I'd play a game called Tettris Attack. It was one of the games I played the most back then, not only because it was fun, but also because it allowed so much replayability. I put some time to understand how to actually make good and strong combos, and practiced on how to make them fast. Fun fact is that I never actually played against anyone, I just played agains the AI.
Their versus mode seemed really well balanced and fun to play, as it'd add different mechanics than the normal mode, and you'd actually have an objective: Defeat your enemy.



It had a story that I never read because I didn't know english back then. As I didn't really knew what was going on, as a child I fantasized all the plot on my head. Even some extra plot... I'd go to the Versus mode and create matches only to make my plot work. It was fun back then and it definitely influenced me on how I play games till this very moment.
They really tried to give personality to each character, and they achieved a lot. Each character had their own music, sfx, background images and even their own little sprites and animations. But what if we added a little more depth to it?

And with this question I started to idealize this game. What if we could add different playstyles for each character? Different strategies, different combos, different effects and so on. Could that still be a balanced and fun game to play?

The Beginning:

So, I made myself those questions about the game's design and let the idea to cook a little in my head. Until one day I thought: you know what? I could make those questions into a game. So I packed my stuff, created a small office area on my house and defined a 1 month plan on Trello.
It was a really simple plan:
- Make a build with Tetris Attack's mechanics with the only difference that when you make a combo on Versus mode you'd trigger "something" (I didn't know what this something was yet)
- Design 4 characters with different effects to be triggered when you make block matches
- Validate the game (balance and stuff)
- Publish somewhere

I started to follow this plan and started to design the system (as I'd need to make it somehow load a character into the grid and blocks) and started to implement it. So, after organizing the project, designed the base system and started developing, I realized something:



IT WAS UGLY!!

I know, it wasn't even a prototype... I could only move blocks and they'd fall when there was nothing below them (there was not even the matching blocks logic), but I needed something to start visualizing the game. I felt like after 3 days of work I should have a better idea on how the game would look like. I stopped and decided to start making the first character's concept, as I'd have to make it sooner or later anyway. And this way I'd actually be seeing what the game needs in order to show the character's indentity through the gameplay. Seemed like a good plan.
I started to think about "what kind of magic could I put into the game". What does witches do? What kind of magic they achieve and so on.
So I found a really cool idea that I thought could work for the first character: Tarot!
It'd fit into the game's Witch theme (if you wanna know more a bout the theme lemme know), it'd add the idea of "Luck" (as cards are normally related to luck) and could have really beautiful designs. There was only one problem: the grid was squared. So, could a card layout work on a squared grid? I started to make the first block actual drawing on Aseprite. After searching a little on pinterest, I found an image for inspiration to make the following concept:



It was already a LOT better than the old blocks, but it started to actually show it's potential once I added a few animations into it:


I was REALLY  satisfied with the result of those animations with the cards. So satisfied that my brain started to explode with ideas to create different characters and stuff. And all those ideas wouldn't be possible with the current scope of the game, so I had to decide:

Will I increase the game's scope or will I keep up with the simple plan?

Well, I guess you already know that I choose to increase the game scope lol
But I know that I can't afford to keep adding stuff to the scope, otherwise I'll never publish anything.


The Real Game Planning

After the choices I made and the stuff I tested, I was glad I realize the potential this game can have. I'll let you know little by little about the ideas that are comming up, but I'm glad I did what I did.
As the scope increased a lot I felt like I couldn't use Trello anymore, as I'd need to keep track of too many different stuff. So instead of just redo the code I was doing I decided to actually give this project a proper Pre Production phase. As I knew that some changes could come and some characters could demand some weird interactions with the system, I decided to actually design it in a way that almost everything can be changed if needed: speeds, controller movements, block matches and so on.
I created the project on Hack n Plan this time as it has a lot more tools for organizing the project than Trello has.
I created a really solid foundation for the game this time so I can really have a good grasp on what I need to do.
With the system changes it will be a lot easier to add content to it once the system is finished. Which means that if you guys like the game I can come up with new characters without having to reprogram the whole game.
The new plan in short:
Make the system as designer friendly I can so I can add content anytime after. And instead of adapting the system to the character everytime, make the system in a way that I can make the characters adapt to it.


Thank you

On June 4 I finished the Pre Production of this game. I planned the first playable version of the game something around the middle of July and I'll keep updating the devlog once a week. I even bought a camera so I can make some parts of the devlog on video (as it's a lot easier to follow than a giant text). As soon as the camera arrive I'll turn all of the information on this log (and maybe some extra stuff) on a Youtube video.
I really hope you liked the game idea so far. I'm really thankfull that you read this log and I hope you keep coming to see the game coming alive!

See ya in the next log!