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Developed between September 2017 and May 2018
Trailer
The Witching Hour is an action adventure platformer with an emphasis on magic abilities that can be used to complete puzzles and objectives.
All the magic in the world has disappeared, leaving everything cold and dark. It's up to you and your trusty cat sidekick to use your conjuring abilities to travel the lands and bring back the magic that has been stolen.
Screenshots
The Project
The Witching Hour was my second major project, and also had double development time of the previous one, giving us 9 months of development time.
Team Composition
Four Designers
Three Artists
Two Programmers
One Animator
One Audio
Game Engine
Unreal
Intended Platforms
PC
Main Inspirations
Tomb Raider
Trine
Skyrider
Enslaved
The Outcome
During this project, I gained new skills in using the Unreal 4 engine, a game engine I had not yet had experience with until this project. It gave me a wider range of options when designing my level, and I feel it gave me an advantage that I did not have when using Unity. I had also never had any experience in developing a tutorial level on my own, so I found this to be a new an interesting challenge, one that I spent as much time as I could refining to ensure that it meets the highest quality it could.
On reflection, whilst I had tremendous fun tackling how best to create a tutorial, I felt too much time was spent making it just right, and neglecting other planned levels that had to be cut for time reasons. In relation to this, whilst the main levels in game were well crafted and executed, I felt as if there was not sufficient to make full use of our mechanics, and the adventure ended up being a polished but short experience.
With my second year project, I was able to improve myself from my first year project, and also fine new challenges and opportunities that would guide me through my final university project.
The Game
If you would like to download and try the game for yourself, click the link below and give it a shot!
The Witching Hour
Overview
For this second project, I was excited to try something different, and luckily my new team had a similar idea. We all made our own individual proposals, with our favourite one being picked to be our main project, with the winner being a game about a Witch with magic abilities that can be used to manipulate the environment around her. My role within the game was to develop a small tutorial level, which detailed all of the abilities the player was able to use and how to use them. This level can be selected from the main main, instead of being implemented at the beginning, a design choice made for beginner players, and so as to not restrict intermediate players. I was also involved in internal play testing and ensuring that the Forest level was as clear to navigate as possible. As with my previous project, I lacked a writer on my team, but in this scenario, everyone collaborated together to create the lore of the game world.
This project had it's initial concept phase in September 2017, with a full development cycle until May 2018, which also included a document containing a full proposal and market plan, outlining exactly where we would place ourselves amongst other similar games within the genre. In total, the game contained 3 large fully playable areas along with a small tutorial.
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