For the battle theme, I aimed for something that was very raw and tribal. I used samples of old skinned drums, vocal shouts and low brass, while avoiding the sounds of modern warfare. Drum patterns are split into different areas of the stereo field to make it sound like you are standing in the middle of the scene, surrounded. I don’t usually have the opportunity to be bombastic with my writing, so working on this theme was a lot of fun!
-Adam Burgess
Right now I’m working on a series of paintings that show Nirvora’s different powers. There are six that the player can choose from; today we’ll look at the planning stages behind the Plant power illustration.
I started with some very rough sketches to get an idea of the pose. Some of them have needed a lot of back-and-forth, especially if Reed has something specific in mind. (Of the lot, this one was probably the easiest to nail down!) I really want to convey not just what power or familiar she has, but how that’s translated to her life– what impact has it had on her personality, her daily activities, where she lives, how she dresses? Reed and I had a really great conversation about this a few weeks ago, and he said one of the real constants of her character development is her courage. No matter what choices the player makes, Nirvora is brave. I want her character designs to show that kind of spirit!
I traced over my first sketch, making changes and adding detail. This is the version I’ll use for the final painting.
I wanted to do a rough mock-up for the colors of her robe. On a separate sheet of watercolor paper I tried out a few different colors, then scanned it in. I used the layer mask feature in Photoshop to quickly block in where the colors would go, to make sure they looked good together. Since layer masks hide or show what you want, I was able to try out a few different arrangements and make changes without permanently erasing any of the watercolor layer. This gives me good idea of how the colors will look in the actual painting, which I’ll be starting later today and will share on my blog.
One of the primary musical themes heard throughout ‘Tales of the Mountain Witch’ is the Village/Pastoral Theme. Its current state is a conglomerate of a few early ideas of mine. The instrumentation, sound design and motifs have influenced several other themes in the game, as I wanted to create a through-line that brought the score together as a cohesive piece. Here’s an early look at how this theme is coming together.
-Adam Burgess
One of the things I want to do is give Nirvora some consistency to her hair style throughout the game. There are so many different paths she can take, and of course it would be boring and nonsensical for her hair to look exactly the same no matter what she’s doing or who she becomes. But I also want there to be something constant that is almost subconscious or just always part of her– and it’s turned out to be her bangs. No matter how her hair is styled or what she’s doing, she nearly always has her hair parted in the center, with a few tendrils of hair framing her face.
Depending on the type of magic you choose, Nirvora may receive one of several familiar spirits. Drawn by André Díaz Cerviño
A special post by our lead artist, Leigh Ann Gagnon. - She gives us some insight into the research that went into developing TotMW’s signature art style.
Today I’m going to talk a little bit about what’s going on under the hood, so to speak. To start with, all of the content of the game exists as a normal, run-of-the mill Twine game, edited using the standard Twine editor. I then export the Twee code (essentially just a single long plaintext file containing all of the prose and structural information for the game), which I will read into my custom interpreter and parse into separate pages. When a page is loaded onto the screen, its twine tags are evaluated, and it is chopped up into lines so that it can be properly displayed. Let’s see how that looks:
You’ll notice the font looks a little bit weird. The display library I’m using, OpenFL, has a “TextField” object that displays text and allows you to insert hyperlinks into the text that send off events to the event system when clicked. Sounds like the perfect solution, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, this functionality only works in the Adobe Flash environment, and not in any others. For a game that needs to be cross-platform, this is a serious problem.
What’s my fix to this? Make my own TextField class, of course! Right now it has an ugly bitmap font that I threw together in Paint, but by the time the game comes out either I or one of my artists will have put together something nicer looking and more legible for you.
Currently, you can scroll the text up and down with the mousewheel, and click on links (the pink boxes) to go from page to page. Variables set by the Twine script are pushed to a stack/map datastructure so that anything that happens to the game state can be gracefully rewound.
At the moment, everything is pretty ugly; one of my next steps is going to be to add some UI placeholders drawn up for me by André. I’m also going to add some support for images and sound that go beyond Twine’s usual capabilities. Hopefully by this time next week I’ll have something more attractive to show off!
-Reed Lockwood
Nirvora is born in a village in the mountains, so it’s an important setting in the game. Reed provided me with some written criteria for how the landscape should look and also drew an aerial view of the village and surrounding area. The first step for me was to translate that image into something more three-dimensional:
To clarify some of the details and to get a better feel for how the land would slope and curve, I worked in Photoshop:
This view still felt like it was from too high of an angle. I wanted something more on the same level with the village. Since we planned to use this image for our social media headers, I checked on the upload dimensions that I would have to use before I did any more drawing. They were all very similar in proportion, despite being different sizes, but this created a new challenge. Reed asked me to emphasize the size of the mountains, but our layout is very horizontal. In the end we landed on something that compromised a bit between the height of the mountains and being able to discern houses in the village.
Did a rough color thumbnail.
Transferred the sketch to illustration board and inked the linework. I made it larger then necessary so that I could try cropping the height different ways.
Started painting! I laid in washes for the sky first, then blocked in other major color areas. I added layers of transparent colors to build up color and depth, and for the mountains used granulating colors to really set them off. Granulating watercolors contain larger particles, which will settle out in different ways and create amazing effects as the water evaporates. I love working with them as the results are always unpredictable and exciting.
I let the painting rest overnight and came back to it with fresh eyes the next morning, adding additional detail where I felt it was needed and outlining in pen some of the foliage shapes on the mountain. Done! Scanned it, then did some minor corrections to take care of a few bad edges and splotches before cropping it to fit for our Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook headers.
Hey everyone! I’m Reed, the game designer and developer on Tales of the Mountain Witch, here to give a rundown of my goals going into this project, followed by my development strategy for the game. At its heart, Tales of the Mountain Witch is a gamebook or hypertext fiction; you may be familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books or with the more recent resurgence of the form’s popularity in the shape of Choice of Games or Twine. If all of this is new to you: It’s a book where every once in a while you stop reading and make a choice which affects how the rest of the story plays out.
My goals for this game are as follows:
Write a robust, open-ended, non-linear narrative - It’s currently all planned out. It’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s not unfeasible.
Replay value - One of the difficulties in presenting a non-linear narrative is convincing the player to explore every branch. I’m going to do this both by providing a bookmarking system that allows the player to jump ahead to sections they’ve already discovered and by adding “cross-narratives” to the text which lie across multiple branches of the story tree.
Music and illustration - Text games can be a bit unapproachable to newcomers, so I’ve hired on some artists and a composer to help draw the player into the world.
I’m currently writing the game in Twine and building a custom Twee interpreter to play it. Here’s a screenshot of my progress on the written portion of it so far:
You can see that it’s already quite large; it’s split up into thirty “episodes” - all of which have been outlined, but only two of which have currently been written. All told, the final game should (conservatively) have at least 500 “pages” of text.
The game is being written in Haxe and OpenFL, and by the end of the project I should have a nice cross-platform twine interpreter. Said interpreter is currently very brittle and tailored to the task at hand, but if I reach the stretch goal on my kickstarter I’ll take the time to spruce it up and release it to the Twine community.
I hope this answers some of your questions; I’ll post again next week when I should have some screenshots of the interpreter in action. See you then!
-Reed Lockwood
Check out our brand new header image courtesy of Leigh Ann Gagnon!
Our story begins in a small village nestled among the mountains, following the journey of the witch Nirvora as she climbs the highest peaks, delves into the secrets of the forbidden forest, and explores the land beyond. Tales of the Mountain Witch is a digital gamebook filled with strange beasts, wild adventures, and ancient magic. Kickstarting this March
