Current focus: Combat Vertical Slice
Also, what is the Vertical Slice?
In game development, the “Vertical Slice” is basically a high quality fragment of the game, a short one but long enough to represent the game. Imagine one level of Candy Crash or one bullet-time fight in Max Payne. It’s a simple idea. The cake is the game, and the slice of the cake is, well, […]
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Aim Assist in Witchfire
The real black magic in our game. How does it all work and why?
Why does aim assist exist? Why does aim assist exist for mouse and keyboard? The answer to the first question is easy. Aim assist was invented to make it possible to play first person shooters with the controller. Aiming with the controller is hard and nowhere near the precision that the mouse offers (there’s a […]
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Snapshot: February 2019
Shotguns and shields, walls and gates.
We’re working on a so-called combat vertical slice, basically an encounter that shows off and proves all basic combat elements. We should be showing some of it to the public in March. Karol is sick and out today, but what is the rest of us up to this Wednesday? Adam started to mesh a new […]
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A Word or Two About the Player's Movement Speed
How fast is too fast?
Two phrases that spring to mind when we think of old school shooters are circle-strafing and backpedaling. The first thing helped avoid the incoming projectile-based fire and to keep enemies in the player weapon’s effective range at the same time. The second thing was basically the result of all enemies just mindlessly – or fearlessly, […]
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The Basic Philosophy Behind Witchfire's Combat, Part II
Literally half of the team is sick, so no real Witchfire material this week. At least nothing visual, as what I want to talk about does concern the game. Posted under one of our Facebook updates, specifically the one about the way we approach combat in Witchfire, a certain comment caught my eye. To me, […]
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The Making of a Monster
Creating a good 3D model is one thing, but having it 100% support a vision is another.
In one of the previous posts we have shown what it takes to make a weapon. Now, let’s see what it takes to make a monster. The pitch to the fantastic 3D modeler Paweł Jaruga was as follows: A galley slave Same enemy faction as the “swordsman” Dead, inflated body of a drowned man Big, […]
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The Basic Philosophy Behind Witchfire's Combat
What do games like Dead Cells and Dark Souls have in common and how Destiny and Call of Duty are on the opposite side of the spectrum? If you said health, you’re right, but that’s just the beginning. Indeed, the first two games don’t have a regenerating health as the core element of the experience, […]
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Snapshot: January 2019
What's on our screens today?
The Witchfire development diary we’re running here usually focuses on the design (like how we work on weapons or what’s our approach to story-telling), but today’s entry is a literal dear diary entry. We’ll be doing these once in a while, probably monthly, and soon the photos will be accompanied by videos. For now, it’s […]
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When Witchfire was not Witchfire
How about a sci-fi post-apo survival sim?
Our new project is a good few years old. If we were just a bit more sane, it should have been released already. Meanwhile, it’s still in a weird pre-pro/production limbo (meaning some elements of the game are in their nearly final form, while some still exist only on paper). Why? It’s not anything new. […]
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