Breaking Out of the Development Lull
Every project I worked on suffered from what I personally call a development lull. When you start a project, things happen fast, you prototype like crazy and make decisions every day. When you finish the project, it’s mayhem, you almost lose control over your tasks. But somewhere in the middle, nothing happens for months, sometimes […]
The Dark Souls of Shooters, Part 2
„Punishing difficulty”, says The Myth of Soulsbornes. “Prepare to die”. Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but finishing any Soulsborne can be done by any dedicated gamer. The games are indeed a bit on the hard core side, but they have nothing on the madness that were Spectrum and Commodore 64 games of the 1980s. One […]
The Dark Souls of Shooters, Part 1
„It’s like the Dark Souls of shooters” came up quite a few times already, and that’s kind of expected, considering we’re a dark fantasy game the creators of which both love and are inspired by Soulsbornes. But is Witchfire really going in that direction? Is making a Soulsborne shooter even possible? There are four major […]
Not a big post or reveal but that’s kind of the point of this dev diary, with rare exceptions. So let me you show you how we dealt with one of the design issues this last week. Check out this video. Can you tell me what happened here? (You may want to turn on the […]
Destiny's Influence on Witchfire
Many times when I am asked a design question by a programmer, my reply is: “See how Destiny does it.” This reached the point when this appeared on our team chat… People following the game have also noticed a lot of Destiny in Witchfire. Luckily, no one seems to have an issue with it… Comment […]
Witchfire at Pixel Heaven 2019
Last week we showed two minutes of Witchfire gameplay at Pixel Heaven 2019. We don’t have any plans to have a presence at any shows this year but we’ve made an exception for Pixel Heaven. Sure, it’s convenient, taking place here in Warsaw, but the real reason is that it’s truly a special thing. It’s […]
Missed the last entry due to national holidays but we’re back with another dear diary. A great thing happened that last week, though. Making Witchfire is super hard. It’s a project, uhm, quite big for a team this small. Painkiller was done, on average, by sixteen people: we started with eleven, but ended up with […]
Here’s what on our screens today: As always, my screen is email and playtests, but here’s something I needed to look at today: the concept art for the musketeer. The reason I had to check it out was to… …compare it to the in-game model. Any character in any video game has three forms: the […]
Is Witchfire the Next Painkiller?
Some people who work on Witchfire were the creative force behind Painkiller. I guess this is one of the reasons we’re seeing this a lot of hope – be it in YouTube or Reddit comments – that our new project is basically Painkiller 2. So to make matters clear, let me use this week’s entry […]