Witch Trials

Description
Witch Trials is a narrative potion-brewing game set in a small New England village during the Salem Witch Trials. The game’s narrative follows a witch, Vivian, and her attempts to lift a curse cast on the village by her late witch mother. In her quest to set things right, Vivian opens an apothecary to treat the village’s people and learn about the nature of their curse.

The core game loop consists of two main phases: social deduction and brewing. During the social deduction phase, players engage with members of the town, aiming to discover the potions they need to fix their emotional state. Players must inquire about the townsfolk’s personal lives to gather information while keeping track of their patience and trying not to aggravate them. Once the player completes the social deduction phase, the game transitions to the brewing phase. Here, players must mix various ingredients to create a potion while addressing their clients’ emotional instabilities, ensuring the potion is not poisonous, and generating some profit on the side. As the game progresses, choices regarding which potions to brew, which ailments to address, and which townsfolk to befriend will shape the village and Vivian’s future. This game was made as part of my IGME-580: Production Studio class, collaboratively, in a group of 5.

Role
During this project I took on the role of Narrative Designer and Lead Writer. As Narrative Designer I worked with the Game Designer to collaborate on how the narrative should inform gameplay and vice versa. Together we created a system where the player would ask questions through dialogue in order to deduce what potion needed to be brewed in gameplay afterwards. I also worked with a developer in order to create a system in Unity that displayed dialogue and allowed the player to question and interact with NPCs and then send the data received from these interactions into the brewing gameplay loop. As Lead Writer I focused on creating interesting characters for the player to interact with as well as the dialogue scripts associated with those characters. I wrote a design treatment to create the setting, characters, and overarching plot of the game. I designed each character interaction like a level that the player must solve through questioning and smart deduction in order to progress. I then communicated my character design ideas to the artist on our team to help give them a starting point to bring the characters to life visually.