Devblog #102

Hey Wizards!
Shady Character One here!

In today's devblog I'd like to talk to you about details that fill the world of Under Your Spell. I often hear praise aimed at game developers that used real locations in their works. But to be fair, using real locations is not extra work nowadays. Maybe twenty years ago, when cramming a real location with all its details an size demanded a lot of ingenuity from the developers, nowadays, when the gamer expect an extremely detailed world from their games, taking an existing location actually makes development easier. Everything is already laid out for you. You don't need to think about variety and details, which is one of the big hurdles, I and Shady Two try to overcome every time we sit down to work on the game.

It is a bit easier for me. As a writer, I can just skip a description and leave a lot to the player's interpretation. Shady Two, on the other hand, can't. She cannot leave a part of the image blank and hope that the player would just imagine something cool in that emptiness. That's why we try to work on filling the artworks with as much cool and descriptive doodads as we can. Even though I try to help her wherever I can, Shady Two still does a lot of heavy lifting in this regard. Like coming up with the lamps and boards that decorate the common room of House Dunagall. Or this vase that isn't just another vase, but has a unique design.

Or this girl on the background of Gwen's intro artwork that hovers her books instead of carrying them.

This manticore head on the wall of Cairngorm's common room was a whole big discussion that needed input from both of us. We wanted an animal head there on that we could agree, but which one? A normal animal head would be a bit boring in the wizard school. But which magical creature would fit then? A unicorn, griffin, and a dragon were out of questions for more reason than one. Mostly because they would sent a wrong message to the players, them being symbols of the other three Houses. So we settled on a manticore, and I had to help Shady Two look up a design that would not look like a simple lion's head, but would not look goofy like many instances do.

But that was a case where there was a design that we could more or less just pick up and plug into the game. It doesn't work with the creature designs that we wand to fit our specific needs. We try to stay as close to the mythology as possible, but that being a mythology, tales told and retold by normies, we leave a lot of leeway for ourselves. For example, goblins, in our world do fill more or less the same niche that they do in most folk tales, but we thought that we could implement their ever-changing design into our lore. One of the way that goblins multiply is by stealing babies and raising them to become goblins. And in these designs by Shady Two you can hopefully see which litters these goblins that you fight during the Trial of Might came from.

Coming up with subtler creature designs in a bit more complicated. We spent some time discussing how to make the oreads and dryads (or their irish counterparts "Sidhe Draoi") look both sexy and otherworldly at the same time. We didn't want them to just be green and grey girls. It was a bit easier to add some animalistic elements to the forest nymphs, but for the mountain ones... Well, I think that our idea and Shady Two's great interpretation of their "jewelry" growing on them in

Nearly every part of every artwork needs this much attention from Shady Two, and I bet she would be happy if she could just use an existing location and not have to come up with every single chimney on the roof of every single house.

Until next week, you all!
Shady Character One, out!