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[Agilethief]

Now released on steam!

Website
http://witchthief.games

Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/675480/Witch_Thief/

Discord:
https://discord.gg/MWVTnBb

Witch Thief is a 3D bullet-hell, set in a quirky fantasy realm. Play as the snarky Witch on a quest to steal the greatest magical Grimoire from the Last Immortal. Dodge and weave through endless waves of deadly projectiles, overcome a cast of quirky mages, unlock new heroes and discover the true power of the Grimoire.

You'll certainly see the inspirations of other Shmups in my design, but I believe Witch Thief brings a unique spin to the genre and from showing at conventions in Australia, think it has a much easier entry point for newcomers to the genre!

Screenshots!

Features!

Unique Bullet-Hell Perspective
Unlike other Shmups, Witch Thief gives you control of a full 3D camera. Rather than the classic birds eye view, you will witness bullet hell from a whole new perspective!

Dodge intricate bullet patterns
Terrifyingly intricate storms of bullets will rain down as you journey on your quest. Study, learn and apply your dodging skills to outmaneuver the incoming perils.Touching even one bullet will kill you - so beware!

Unlock a range of quirky playable characters
Choose to play one of many Witches. Experience fresh new dialogue, different bosses and unique spells to achieve their goals.Each character has unique spells and dialogue, and may encounter different and challenging bosses on their path to the Grimoire.

Musical tracks
A fully original soundtrack, accompanying you on your perilous journey to the Grimoire. Each character and stage has a unique theme that captures and plays upon their essence.

Battle Relentless Bosses
Your path is not an easy one. Face insane bosses, wielding great magical power and unleashing torrents of complex bullet patterns. They will stop at nothing to protect the Grimoire.

Unravel a world of mystery
As you explore and overcome every stage of the game learning more about the world first from the perspective of the Witch Thief, but later as many other unlockable characters you will experience new perspectives of the story.

Difficulty ranges:
Not everyone wants the hardest difficulty. Witch Thief ranges from practically no combat “Chill” mode to the extreme “Insanity” mode which increases both bullet counts and speed. Oh you only get one life there too.

Disclaimer:
Bright Colours
Flashing Lights
Camera Shake
If you encounter something in Witch Thief that you feel should be in this Disclaimer, please reach out!

Find out more!

If you are interested in finding out more you can come visit my website for Witch Thief!
http://witchthief.games

Or if you want to check it out on Steam you can wishlist it now! It'll be releasing soon!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/675480/Witch_Thief/

If you want to stay in closer touch, you can come join our community discord and come say hi!
https://discord.gg/MWVTnBb

// EDIT: Below here is the original post ======================================================
// EDIT: Below here is the original post ======================================================
// EDIT: Below here is the original post ======================================================

Witch Thief is a 3D Bullet hell set in a quirky fantasy realm
Play as a snarky Witch on a quest to steal the greatest magical grimoire
from the last Immortal warrior. Dodge and weave through bullet hell,
overcoming a cast of quirky mages.

Video of Witch Thief Gameplay

Goal

Your goal is to reach the end of each level, blasting through a series
of smaller stage minions and the much more complex and deadly bosses.
To do so you will need to master dodging and weaving through the intricate
bullet patterns that the enemies fire at you.

Progress:

I have completed approximately 30% of the game. The core systems for
building levels and bullet patterns are in. Still ironing out little bugs.
Focusing mainly on the vertical slice I've got so far and once that is looking
slick I'll begin to build on the rest of the content.

Character:

I'm not settled on the art style presented here however, this is
the progress on the character I have built so far.
Hoping to exaggerate the animations a fair whack more

Music:

So far, I have no music at all in the game.
My chief inspiration Touhou is renowned for its music and I'll likely
aim towards it for Witch Thief.
Happy to hear from any musicians out there who think they might be a good fit

The Team:

Witch Thief is primarily developed by myself, Timothy Bermanseder.
In true indie fashion I'm handling almost all aspects from art to programming
to music and marketing.
I'm not too intent on keeping it that way I just haven't really needed to branch
out and recruit more people to work on it yet.

A shoutout goes to the rest of the guys at Cardboard Keep who help me playtest and
discuss design.

When did the project start?

I started the project as a weekend design experiment on the 8th of March, 2017.
I've been working on it for a little over two months.

Inspirations:

It started as a design experiment for taking a traditional bullet hell
Shmup and pulling the camera down into a third person perspective. This quickly
evolved into seeing how far I could take it programming as I am trained as a
game artist not a programmer.
And then, I was just having too much fun!

My core inspirations for the game stem from Touhou, a Japanese bullet hell and
Tyrian my childhood shmup of choice.

I'd love to hear any and all thoughts so I can make this into a sweet little game
I'm hoping to post my progress here every week so if I fall behind go ahead and get on my case :D

[Joh]

I saw this and thought wait this is touhou!
Its looking pretty good (and crazy)!
I'm also impressed that this is only 2 (solo) months in, off to a good start!

best of luck!

[Agilethief]

Yeah I'm a bit worried I've drawn too heavily on Touhou and might need to dial down the frilly dresses xD.
That said I imagine fans of Touhou fall right into my target audience so the overlap isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Cheers! It's been a fun ride so far.

[Agilethief]

DEVLOG: 2017-05-17

It's been a slow week for in game production as I juggle my other responsibiilities (Check out Attrition another game I'm working on over on Greenlight)

Its not all been slow however, I've recorded a series of scratch audio to begin implementing and expirimenting with humming a sweet tune and converting it to notes in fruity loops. Nothing valuable yet but the process is there now. Not really an audio engineer however so its an up hill battle.

In our local community we had our monthly meetup and I showcased the game. People seemed to really enjoy it which is quite promising, naturally they all tried on the hardest difficulty and got totally trashed. One guy nearly made it to the end of the vertical slice though.
The feedback I collected however along with some other playtesting was great. Lots of little thigns to adjust like the Enemies colours blending with the other bullets a bit too much to hilarious things like one player who ran away from the pickups that power you up because he thought they might be deadly (and in a one shot kill game can you really take that risk?)

Shown here, an ambiguous enemy attack that splits into multiple shots, players couldn't see this attack in all the other bullets. I will change this attack to be a more obvious colour

The current design has a "Spell" attack that feels terrible atm, I am considering merging the "Bomb" and the "Spell" into one thing, unifying their purpose in the design space and simplifying the control scheme. Doing so however would prevent more defensive (spawn a shield) effects as the "bomb" needs to be able to clear a large amount of bullets.

I have begun building a landing page website for the game, my brother (web genius) is helping me build it and I hope to be able to show it off soon. It will be the first point of contact for a lot of people.

Finally today I begun building a marketing plan and researching merch options in Australia for a local Con coming up that I hope to explore selling merch at and begin building a community. If anyones interested in my notes just hit me up.

Till next week! (or if someone comments <3)

[Agilethief]

It's been a great week for Witch Thief, we've decided to take it to PAX AUS 2017 and I've been in the process of coordinating with the organizers of it to ensure we can get a spot there. In addition I have spoken with the reps of GammaCon (local Canberra convention) and they are cool for me to execute an idea I've been meaning to try out.

That is, Convention specific builds of the game. Limited edition that you can only get at that convention.

My thought process behind this is to generate more hype and excitement for the cons by offering something unique to only that convention. In addition to being able to purchase the unique build you also get unique swag for your efforts. I'll keep you all posted on how it turns out. Should have results on this in about 2 months and if it works out I hope to do something similar for PAX.

On the development side of things I have most recently implemented Rewired, a Unity input plugin that makes it all a lot easier to work with and in doing so now have controller support (a oft requested feature) and have begun work on implementing rebindable key maps, my goal is for both keyboard and controllers to be remappable. Something I never see is being able to remap controllers (Though I am a PC gamer so I don't use the controller much haha)

Looking to the future I have blocked out a great deal more of the story and where the characters sit in it, this in turn has fleshed out the world and provided the inspiration needed for a series of costume/character sketches that will drive the creation of the games characters.

I have also begun concepting what a logo for the game could look like. Which one do you guys like?

Finally a series of small adjustments to the general flo[/center]w of the game, transitioning from and too levels is now smooth and the camera spawns correctly behind you rather than zooming across the map in the first few seconds to get in position. I love this as despite being such a small thing it makes the game feel so much more like a real game.
Likewise the character now flies into the scene rather than just already being there, this kinda reminds me of Ratchet and Clank entering a level.

Till next time

[Caravaggio]

Looks cool.  The world needs more 3d bullet hells.

Curious about the thief aspect of the plot.  Does stealing figure into the gameplay at all?  Can we get abilities from enemies or anything like that?

The logos: think I like 2, but it could use some space around the outer circle.  The ones on the right make it easier to see the t and w, but have a lot of empty space on top.

[Agilethief]

Yeah I haven't seen many 3D bullet hells which struck me as pretty odd so I took a stab at it haha

Regarding the thief aspect, I was a bit taken by the "Blue Mage" idea and would love to do a Kirby-esque spell stealing thing however I have my hands full building out the rest of the game.
That said, the main premise of the story is an ancient Grimoire that the Witch is off to steal and I intend to build a system for exploring a bit more of the lore by "stealing" aka defeating patterns and having them turn into little cards or pages in a book to be viewed from the main menu (an encyclopedia if you will) tying in some progression elements to the design without really influencing the core gameplay.

[Agilethief]

Just a little update.
In our office we do a thing we call "Today I" which is just a list on Discord of all the things you did today. They end up looking a little like patch notes haha which is pretty neat.
Regardless I'm going to post some of these here as they come up.

Today I:

• -Put up a inspiration board on the corkboard
  
• -Tweaked the default lighting shader so now everything is a bit more toony
  
• -Made a ref board for the Witch
  
• -Begun work on the Witch, blocking her out.
  
• -Emailed Smash! about showing Witch Thief off there in late August (have numbers, just ask)
  

Not super happy with the jacket, it is dominating the design a lot and feels like it's getting in the way of the ribbons I want to attach. Also... a bit more schooly than I was imagining the Witch

Feedback welcome     

[Agilethief]

Today more character work, here are some shots. A bit grainier than I would like but I suspect that's due to my postFX stack and should be resolved once I start setting up the character in engine properly. These are just highpoly concepts as I work on the costume design of the character.
Also shown here is some toony shading I've recently implemented.

Tell me what you think

[Agilethief]

Time for another devlog! :D

As mentioned previously, I'll be taking Witch Thief to PAX Aus and showcasing it there! Should be awesome fun. All signed and paid for, just need to get the game ready for it.
First on the convention milestone list is GammaCon though, I hope to have the entire first level completed and fleshed out.

PAX Aus 2015 - Our Warden booth!

We have controller support through the help of Rewired now. It will make showcasing at conventions a lot easier!

I've been exploring building the characters for the game, chief amongst these was looking into Marvelous Designer to quickly and realistically design garments. It's been decent, I'm not completely sold on using it for all the character clothing design as I am a lot faster building them in Blender before going to Zbrush. I suspect I will use it for some basic cloth layouts and concepting as well as more frilly objects which are harder to model. The main forms however I think will just be traditionally modelled.
My main concern at the moment is the speed it takes to build a character, I feel it is too slow at this stage however it is worth acknowledging that a lot of time at this stage is being eaten up by research and design of the overall characters and pipeline. So once I get this down I imagine they will all speed up.

Shown here is my progress on characters and I feel like I need to get back to the roots of the almost Lolita style costuming with big dresses, bows and poofy shoulders. While no.3 is my current take on the Witch I'm likely going to scrap most of it and start fresh with what I've learned here in mind.

An interesting aside, I currently work on the Witch, the main character of the game and yet by the end of development I will likely be far better and confident with the style of the game. While I don't plan to redo any characters I can foresee wanting to recreate the main characters much further down the pipeline.

Finally I've been working on some environmental art, mushrooms and big gates. These are simple objects yet can breathe so much life into the world and very much help explore the feel and style of the game. I've grown fond of the soft vertical gradient look for the environment props, generally fading from dark purple to a lighter pastel on top. It's really easy and quick to do and looks pretty.

Also shown here is a new shader I wrote that combines vertex blending and triplanar UVs. The cobblestones naturally blend into the grass and it's as simple as painting where I want stones to be on the ground. 

To the future, My chief concerns at this stage is the look development of the game. Finding the characters and how to express them in the game world.
I intend to explore more cel shading methods, particularly inverted hulls for the outlines of characters, and something for specular highlights.

Hope you like how it's coming along! If you want more active content or casual chats check out my twitter    

[Agilethief]

Unhappy with how the witch was turning out I redid her outfit to be a lot more like the original witch.
Here are some shots of it + Video for a turn table.

Witch Turntable

This is a gif of the turntable but I highly recommend hitting the link above for a much smoother and nicer quality render.

[Agilethief]

G'day friends! Time for another weekly update on Witch Thief's progress.
It's been a bit of a funny week (but which week isn't eh) My focus has mainly been towards the character and look dev of the game.


Outlines!
Making use of the inverted hull method for drawing outlines I've been experimenting with some shaders to draw an outline around objects.
I didn't want to use a post FX for this as that is both heavy and doesn't play super nice with a lot of other post FX. Likewise I would like to experiment with using the vertex colours of the mesh to influence the thickness of the outline so that I may get variable line weight.

Mushrooms with a cute lil outline.

Character!

Progress on the new witch is going well. I've bit the bullet and just pushed through with this design and have it in engine and nearly ready to go. Just a bit more skinning to do to ensure it animates correctly.
I've opted to use very similar rigs, chief among which is identical bone names so I can retarget the animations pretty easily and should have my new witch playable quite soon.
The human shape also lends itself to Unity's humanoid rig which opens up quick and easy head IK and the like (Already implemented on the first Witch)
What do you guys think? Do you like the outlines?

Witch with and without outlines.

The future!
I mentioned my week had been a bit funny, and for a moment lets talk about non dev specific stuff. My car died As such I can't get into the office space Cardboard Keep rents for us to all work out of very easily and I'll likely be working from home a lot more now. This is a bit terrifying as I'll need to be a lot more disciplined there so that I don't get distracted and just play Overwatch all day haha.

For Witch Thief progress feels slow, particularly the past two weeks and I'm hoping that with the character being pushed through the pipeline things will start to pick up again. Before Gamma.Con (5th/6th August) I hope to have five characters done, and I already have two practically complete. Next up would be the Wizard character.


That's it for this week! as always like subscribe and all the other stuff you're told to tell viewers to do at the end of posts

[Agilethief]

G’day friends! Been hard at work consolidating the past few weeks of work into the actual build of the game. I’m pleased to show you all a new video of the vertical slice populated with all new environment art and the new Witch character.
 

VIDEO LINK

I’ve made use of a tool called Quick Brush to rapidly paint down props and assets in the level, it sure beat individually placing and scaling each bush of grass (Did that on Warden originally it bloody sucked haha) This method allowed the dressing of the forest level to be both very quick and easy to adjust but also quite organic.
 

As you’ll see in the video, the new gates in the game world certainly help set the atmosphere and over the course of the level I’ve aimed to increase the frequency of construction, that is more gates and more fences. This gradient should allow for the level to feel like a transition from murky woods to castle grounds without needing to spell it out to the player.
 

The new Witch is not yet using any new animations. Through careful naming of my bones and the humanoid rig within Unity I pretty much could just drop the new Witch in over the top and reuse all the previous animations.
I would like to go back and create new unique animations for the Witch however it’s not needed at this stage.
 

Next up will be

• Fixing a series of bugs that have evolved (seemingly out of nowhere!)
• Begin work on the Wizard character
• Create actual art for pickups instead of the coloured cylinders they are atm.

Hope you all like how it’s coming along! Drop me a line if you have any questions.

[Agilethief]

G'day Friends
Another Week another Devlog.

First a note about another game I'm working on Attrition, we recently released it to open Beta, if turn based strategy is your jam check it out over on Itch.IO

Get Attrition here!

This week has been good for production of Witch Thief, finally starting to get back into the swing of things after feeling a bit dodgy about the project the past few weeks.
This week I merged the Bomb and Spell systems into one. So they now use the same button and the same resource but every character's bomb/spell is unique.
This has the benefit of making the game simpler to play but more interesting to engage with as well as making my life a lot easier as I don't need to support two similar systems.

The first Spell I created was the titular Witch's spell "Steal Bullets" being a Witch who steals the magic of other casters I thought it only fitting that she turn enemy spells back against them. This feels a lot more fun and interesting to use than the previous bomb, Which simply cleared the field, and the Laser, which was big and slow but never quite felt powerful.

In addition to every character having a spell, now like when the bosses move through their stages and announce it to the screen, the player casting their spell is announced to the screen. I believe this helps tie to two together so the world seems more connected and coherent.

Along with the characters having an active spell they can cast, each character has a passive ability to alter the way they play. This was in part inspired by Nuclear Throne's characters who feel so different and it's fun to unlock a new character to discover what they can do.
The Witches passive ability is similar to her spell, When she dodges all bullets she passes through are "stolen" and reflected back the way they came.
I'm considering also allowing this to be a "Life saver" which automatically activates if the player has their dodge on cool down. Effectively making the Witch a lot easier and more friendly for newer players.

I spent some time the past week updating UI assets to make them feel more in theme and more importantly not be the default Unity assets haha. Still missing a few pieces but it has come along nicely and certainly will help drive the direction of the UI in the future.

In addition to the UI art changes, I have implemented a timed based system for extra challenge to players, allowing them to beat bosses extra fast for extra points. This is the beginnings of a system of collectable spell cards to encourage replayability and scratch that "Gotta collect em all" itch.

Finally bug fixing! Spent a good chunk of time this week correcting many of the little bugs that come up, especially those stemming from implementing new character art, filling a level with art and merging two systems together. Funnily enough I also fixed a bug I hadn't realised existed but certainly caused a lot of lag. That being that enemies could die multiple times! Doing so would spawn extra pickups (Throwing the balance of a stage right out) and slowing the game to 1 fps when collecting them.

I've begun to experiment with locking the FPS to set numbers (60fps for now) and am finding it much more stable to play the game. Yes I can get 100 upwards frames but it fluctuates so much and by locking it the game feels just a touch smoother. I hope to expose the frame locking to the player in the options so they can set it's limit themselves.

Cheers! I hope you all liked this update. The game is coming along and I feel on schedule for early August to showcase it to the public.

Till next time  
   

[Agilethief]

G’day friends! Another devlog for the progress of Witch Thief.
This past week has been kind, lots of little things getting ironed out, bugs cleaned up and polish coming in. Progress towards my deadline of August for the vertical slice deadline feels like it’s progressing well.

Banner Art

For showing at cons, on the website and all kinds of things gorgeous banner art is a must. I’ve reached out to Merkerinn, a talented artist to outsource this art and she’s produced some great results so far. She is just exploring the character and the tone at the moment.
It is a pure joy though to see a character you have designed, be rendered so awesomely. Quite pleased with her work so far and looking forward to the final results.

Pickups

 

No longer will the player be picking up shiny cylinders, This week I have replaced all the pickups in the game with proper art, better communicating the value and purpose of these pickups as well as offering new UI to help tie the mechanics with the visuals.
I’m not 100% happy with them so far, still a bit rough round the edges particularly the UI icons and imagine I’ll be repainting them at some point in the future. That said, I like to work fast and iterate a lot so I’m content with where it’s at right now.

Playtesting and bug fixing

 
In doing a wider playtest in the studio I discovered a whole series of little bugs that needed fixing, some of the prime offenders were timers that did not respect the game time (Which pauses when the player pauses) and the options menu which half of it was hooked up to the wrong values and thus caused all kinds of annoying performance issues.
 

The games menu UI is now much slicker, it fades between pages a lot smoother, no longer fading to black between everything. Likewise I’ve tuned up the buttons to be much more reactive to mouse events, growing larger as you mouse over them and giving a lot more feedback.
Finally, I cleaned up the stage select screen to actually slide between stages instead of snapping and disabling the buttons if there are no more stages to slide too. Overall it feels a lot nicer.
 
Menus are kinda funny in that no one cares about them until they are terrible but a good slick menu/UX can do wonders for making a game feel more solid and real.
 

Feedback on the game expressed that dodging was hard to understand. Mainly when you could and could not dodge. I thought for a long time I didn’t need to worry about it, playing games like Enter the Gungeon or Nuclear Throne, they don’t indicate too heavily when you can dodge again. However acting on this feedback I’ve looked to a game a play a lot more of, Overwatch and it’s use of abilities and cooldowns.
As such I’ve moved the Dodge indicator down to the center of the screen and built it to both count down the time until you can dodge again and radially shift. This is a lot more explicit and much easier to see. I will find out if its where the dodge needs to go in the future with more playtests.
That said I am feeling that I might move it further to the left or right as it is a little in the way sitting in the bottom center of the screen.
 
Playing the game a lot while testing caused me to see the dialogue a lot.
I didn’t want to do it (cause obviously I want people to read the text) but I’ve added in the ability to skip text. That is, if you press again while the text is typing, it completes the entire text segment and allows you to press to move on.
It works really well, maybe too well. Skipping through the dialogue is really easy now.
 
I can’t really control how people will play my game so instead I’d rather make it easy for lots of people play it the way they want to play it.

What's next

 
In the near future I will be beginning work on the boss characters and getting them implemented into the game.
Additionally with only a month to go before GammaCon I’ll be committing to designs and production of merchandise to begin exploring how successful it could be.
 
Till next time

[Agilethief]

Howdy friends, This week has been a hectic one but I’ve got some work I’d love to share with you.

New character:

I’ve spent some time working on the midboss of the first stage, she is a more wild and tribal like creature. I looked to characters like Princess Mononoke for inspiration here.
The sculpt has come out quite nicely and I’ve begun the retopology process. I’m pleased with the forms I got as it makes the baking phase so much easier. Less pieces to worry about.

Banner art update:
The promotional banner artwork is progressing well, we’ve locked down composition and are happy with the direction it is going.

With these I have begun mocking up fliers and other merch for printing.
The plan with the fliers is to use standard business cards which are nice and cheap, the front will be the pretty cover art with the game title and the back will be like the back of a game box or book, showcasing a few screenshots, the site URL and the game's key features. This will be handed out to everyone who visits our booth.   

Begun work on Itch page etc;

Further, in preparation for a more public announcement of the game. I’ve begun constructing an Itch.io page, a landing website (mentioned in an earlier log) and Steam.
This has been great for getting me to actually create screenshots, define the feature set of the game and all these meta/marketing tasks we like to leave to the last moment haha.
 
Tuned game lighting

Finally I’ve been experimenting with nicer lighting and by bringing in an actual skybox rather than the Unity procedural sky I got much softer and nicer lighting.
Because I didn’t actually want to see the sky, I simply left the fog drawing over the sky and kept the mistier forest I was after.

Finale
Wrapping up, I hope to finish retopology over the weekend and get the bake done, next week will be rigging and getting the first pass animations in.
I thought it’d be neat if the first boss was introduced by leaning over a dead basic enemy (Doll) as if it were eating it and spinning around to face the player when they enter the area.
On top of that, more polish and work on the storefronts and hopefully the final promo art so I can finalize the game merch.

Till next week, peace out    

PS (Sorry for the late update, someone dug a trench through the internet line on our street so I was offline for a littel while :S )

[Agilethief]

Hey there friends, time for another Witch Thief Devlog!
I missed last week unfortunately due to some less than wise sleeping hours cutting away at my work schedule. Ideally back on track now, just in time for the final sprint before GammaCon.

First up, I finished the Forest Wolf character, getting her all rigged up and in engine. Looks sweet to see it come to life.
I’m not super pleased with the rigging job I did but it’s passable for what she’s going to be doing, it can be really tempting to make it all complex and accurate but like, 99% of the time she’s going to be floating back and forth slinging bullets. It’s not a big deal she can’t blink perfectly.

With that complete, the only tasks remaining before GammaCon and the first public showing of the game are.

• -The Angel Character
• -The Website/store fronts
• -Creating and printing Merch

This leads us nicely to the banner art that is underway! It is nearly complete and is gorgeous. Merkerinn has done a fantastic job. In the studio we discussed potentially using it on the main menu and animating it slightly, akin to how LoL can animate their 2D portraits or Hearthstones golden cards.
With this art finalising I look forward to using it for all the different merch and cards we intend to print.

Exciting news, We are about to sign a musician on to do our music. I initially explored just doing it myself but the results were… less than great and it would have taken too long to build my skill up. Stay tuned I’ll have more about this in the future :D

Likely going to do a big post soon for website etc;
I may miss next weeks post in favour of doing one big announcement (where I’ll likely edit to original post too.) This will make public the landing page, the itch page and the steam page. Steam would stay on wishlisting likely until the game is complete.
It would mark a milestone forward!

Cheers and until next time :D

[Agilethief]

G’day friends,

It’s been about 2 weeks now since my last post. I’ve chockablocked getting a demo of Witch Thief ready for a local con.
That’s all over now! The con was a lot of fun! I’ll go into more detail below.


The vertical slice of the game is very nearly complete! The last thing waiting is an audio pass to get music and sound fx into the game. Beyond that what you seem in the gameplay preview is greatly representative of what the game will be like.

GammaCon is the local convention I showed Witch Thief at, I was a bit unsure how the crowd would recieve the game, as it’s by no means an easy experience and I was worried players would be quickly turned off from all the deaths they would experience.
My fears were unfounded it seems, the crowd had a blast with it, everyone seemed to understand Witch Thief was not a super cruisey experience and dove in.
One of the great joys of showing at a con, is the children, seeing a kid come up and try your game and just be enraptured by it is a truly a pleasure.

Not everything was hunky dory though, the game certainly had its share of bugs, the most egregious ones we’d nipped in the bud with earlier play testing but some still slipped through. The worst offender was a bug that would drop the player back out to the main menu when they died, due to the controller scrolling to the bottom of the options (on death) to the “return to menu” option and the player holding down buttons would register.
 
The booth setup was pretty chill, effectively just a table we tried our best to make it all lovely and appealing, the game sitting on a pretty menu screen certainly seemed to draw people in.

We tried out selling merchandise! We acquired about $1200 AUD (~$950 USD) worth of shirts, posters and cards to hand out. While we didn’t manage to recoup all our costs, we still have merch to sell on and hope to sell it at PAX Aus in a couple of months. We took to an upselling model ranging from the base game of WT to a super bundle of all of CK’s games + Poster + Shirt. Almost every sale upsold to the largest tier so we are very optimistic about going with this model again in the future.

Exciting news! Witch Thief is now up and public to the world. I’m holding off releasing on Steam, but it is wishlist-able now. If you are really keen for Witch Thief though you can purchase the game on Itch.io and follow along with production as I finish building the game!
Finally we have our landing page up, come check it out. It’s theoretically the first point of contact for a lot of new players with the game and should explain both what the game is and where you can go get it.
Check out links:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/675480/Witch_Thief/
https://cardboardkeep.itch.io/witch-thief
http://witchthief.games/

So what’s next?
Next I will be delving into audio and getting the systems for that all hooked up. One of the biggest pieces of feedback at GammaCon was the absence of all audio, so developing this system and beginning to understand the intricacies of audio. Following on from this though is more stages! It will be fun to get to develop more levels for the game again!

So till next time!

[Agilethief]

So I've stopped updating directly here but I'll post occasional updates.

I've been working on a new level. Here are some screenshots for it c:

Check out the imgur link for more!
https://imgur.com/a/XNtgM

[Agilethief]

Witch Thief has a release date! The 21st of September!
So it's now 99% done!
I'm going to edit the main post to reflect these changes!