First review is now in also from RockPaperShotgun, with Wytchwood making it’s ‘best of’ list!

Check it out here!

Some our very first concept art:

Playstation Blog Post: https://blog.playstation.com/2021/08/05/bewitching-crafting-adventure-wytchwood-comes-to-brew-on-ps4-ps5-this-fall/
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/729000/Wytchwood/

Here’s a typical scene in Wytchwood with how it looks when working in Unity.

We’ve set it up so that our game camera can follow our editor camera around. This helps immensely with setting the visual style of Wytchwood. This way, we use a typical workflow within our engine while getting a very good idea of how placing objects is going to look in the end.

The ground in Wytchwood always looks really detailed. We achieve this by using a tool to “paint”many objects on the ground. The problem is when there are so many objects close together videogame cameras can have a hard time determining which object is “closer.” The result of that is one object could be rendered in front of another object when it should be rendered behind.

This is handled with a special camera that renders the ground first,

then the regular camera renders the rest of the scene on top of it.

The blue blob on the ground is the AI NavMesh. We use this to determine if part of the world is accessible by the player and NPCs. In a typical 3D game, a NavMesh might be generated based on placement of floors, ladders, stairs and obstacles. In Wytchwood, it made sense to be able to author it by hand.

This takes a bit of upfront effort but is easy to maintain and really fast to iterate on. It also allows us to specifically define where we want the player to be able to go. Consider the following:

This is an eagle eye view of a scene in Wytchwood. You might see that the navmesh doesn’t stretch down all the way to the base of those rock pillars. That’s because they might get in the way of the player being able to see where they’re going.

The NavMesh also comes into play when we want to make sure that The Witch is always able to find goodies.

And this breezy foliage here I feel is pretty sharp.

We put a lot of effort in taking our beautiful art assets and turning it into a lush world full of breath and life. Thanks for tuning in!

Liam

Hey everyone! Our team is waist deep in Wytchwood development and we’ve been hard at work on full production over the last several months. But it’s healthy to come up for air once and while, so we’d like to share with you guys what we’ve making on a more regular basis.
Every month, we’ll be giving updates on the progress of the game with new screenshots, gifs, and highlights from the team.

Wytchwood is a narrative adventure game set in a world of fables and fairy tales, so you’ll be interacting with a lot of folks. Through this dialogue system complete with awesome portrait art, you’ll be able to converse, curse, or cure the characters you meet.

There’s also plenty of citters and beasties that inhabit the forests, and you’ll have to use some ingenuity to best them.

In this sequence, the witch needs to get some dog hair to make a spell, but the dog is more than a match for her old bones.
Dogs will eat meat though, so maybe she can trick it into eating some bait infused with a sleeping potion!

That’s it for this time, wishlist on Steam to keep up with our updates!