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Racheal Klink
LEVEL DESIGNER
Game Jams
Bewitching Brew
Art by Letitia Longbons
Bewitching Brew was a game jam creation for the 2024 Fall Game Jam at my university, hosted by the Art U Game Club that I am part of leadership with. A small team of four, including myself, worked on this project for three weeks. I did a lot of the 3D modeling and all of the level design. The team had a fellow 3D modeler, a concept artist, and a programmer. This project definitely worked us to the bone and we found all manner of challenges along the way.
In Bewitching Brew, you play as the sister of a pair of siblings who have been caught by a hag in the forest. Since you're pixies, the hags hut is huge to you. Trapped in some glass jars, you manage to free yourself while your brother is stuck due to having a book ontop of his jar. From here, you must navigate the hut without touching the floor and find a way to free your brother.
You meet Hex, a spell book that promises to help you free your brother and yourself from the clutches of this evil hag who has captured you. Yet, as you explore the room, you note that there doesn't seem to be much in the way 'dark and evil' in her hut. In fact, she might even be a nice witch.
Our concept artist was a huge help in getting the top-down map put together. She also made a lot of the beautiful art assets that went with the game too. Letitia's art portfolio will be linked below.
I modeled the level in Unreal entirely after her mockup here. There were some slight changes along the way as I needed to make sure the players sight lines and pathing were interesting and unique.
Our biggest obstacle with this was that we didn't want the player to be able to see the whole room at any given time. So we needed to come up with interesting and unique ways to block lines of sight that went from one end to the other.
Top-Down Map by Letitia Longbons
After we implemented a handful of sight line changes, we needed to work on the player path and the potion creation. Creating potions to get out of the hag's hut was a key mechanic that went through a handful of ideas. We leaned on visual novels that utilized mechanics like dragging and dropping ingredients into a 2D pot such as Potionomics and Potion Permit.
UI design by Letitia Longbons
Bewitching Brew ended up being a mix of 3D and 2D game play. The player would explore the hut in search of ingredients to be brought to mixing stations located in different area's of the hut. The ultimate goal was to create a potion to either give fuel to the book that is 'helping' the player, or further trap the book in which case, the player would then actually form a bond with the hag. Finding out that she's just a lonely witch wanting a friend and the spell book was actually the evil entity manipulating her.
The above and below images are a brief chronology of the white boxing process that eventually got replaced with actual assets throughout the hut. This part probably took the longest. I took it one section at a time and made sure that all of the space was filled out as best as possible. This meant that sometimes what I had originally white boxed ended up being changed to fit what was being put in the scene. I even ended up making some last-minute changes to what needed to be modeled out. This included adding in some last-minute design details or taking things out.
Letitia Longbon Art: https://www.artstation.com/letitialongbons
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