The Creation of Wicker and the Whispering Flame

Before the Fall semester even started, I had a general idea of what I wanted to create for my senior thesis project. I have been interested in making games since I was little, and most of my time in IMM has been spent learning about games and game development. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a lot of smaller scale projects over the past few years, and I wanted to use thesis to challenge myself and create something bigger. Of course, game development is a very time intensive process, so I had to limit my scope in some way. Ultimately I decided that I was going to try and create something more like a polished demo - my project was going to be more than a mock-up or prototype, it would feature fully complete game systems, and be fully playable, but it would feature just a taste of content. That way, I could challenge myself to create a framework that could support a full game, without needing to fill it out with too much content. 

It took me a long time to come around to an actual premise, and I can’t say exactly what sparked this idea. It was a lot of things, I guess - I’m a big fan of roguelikes (broadly speaking, a genre of game where the player starts from scratch every time they lose, populated with randomly generated levels) and had been messing around with procedural generation for a few months. I also really wanted to create a more fast-paced action oriented game, since my last few games had been a bit lighter on that sort of thing. Wicker is loosely based on a game I made for Games I called Warped, which was a little top-down dungeon crawler where the player fought enemies with spells they cast from a magic tome. I got to thinking about how I might adapt that premise to a 3D game, which sparked more ideas, like creating a more complex magic system, close quarters weapons, and more. 

The idea developed slowly and steadily from there, and by the end of November the game had a simple proof-of-concept prototype, an artstyle, and a way-too-long game design document. I knew that since Wicker was going to be a larger scale game, I had to be careful during development to keep my systems very flexible and modular. I wouldn’t be able to get anything done if I had to write a whole new script and retool half my codebase every time I got the idea for a new spell. The end product was pretty flexible - I had a relatively easy-to-use system for adding new weapons, spells, and items right from the Unity Editor, without writing any new code (most of the time). I used a Trello board to keep my tasks organized, and tried to keep a tight schedule so I could build everything I wanted to.

Naturally, there were still a lot of challenges. Being my first game of this scale, by the later parts of the Spring semester holes were showing in my code, and starting to slow down development a bit. The game also started to struggle with performance issues as it got larger, which were difficult to find and fix. Ultimately, I did manage to release one playtest version of the game, but I wasn’t able to make much more progress beyond that. 

The pandemic wouldn’t seem to be all too much of an issue for a project like this, since it is purely digital, but it posed some problems, mainly with regards to playtesting. It’s much harder to get a good feel for how difficult, or how engaging or understandable your game is without being able to see someone play it in person. It’s also just harder to find playtesters off campus, since the process requires both convincing people to download your game, and to relay their feedback to you. I create and publicized my playtest on itch.io, and provided a Google Form for feedback, but ultimately only got a few responses.

Despite those challenges, I’m very happy with where Wicker is. There are so many more ideas I had for it, but I’m still satisfied that I got the game where it is now. I’m looking forward to continuing to develop it further after graduation.