Witch Arcana: Magic School
Witch Arcana: Magic School was a game that we created in 9 months, with a limited budget and a small team. It was meant to be a fast-paced project, with its objective being fast turnaround and an easily scalable live-ops pipeline.
My role was to lead this project from the art side— that includes leading the process of ad testing, as well as directing the style, theme, execution, and managing the team to make sure that everything was delivered on time and to the quality that we want.
Theme explorations with ad testing.
Kingdoms of Heckfire is a 4x strategy game that has city building and PVP elements. When we decided to reskin this, especially with a short timeline, we knew we needed a theme that could map to its features easily without too many adjustments.
We did a series of ad testing to settle on a theme that fit the gameplay we had, as well as something that we knew resonated with an audience. Ultimately, the theme we chose was “Magical Dark academia”
The World of Magical Dark Academia
I wanted the world to look magical, eerie, but still appealing, without edging into being too grim dark. I wanted to capture the mysterious dark academia atmosphere without the world being too washed out.
Characters
The characters are to be Heroes in a Gacha system. I wanted them to be appealing, colourful, with clear personalities, while also giving enough gameplay information for players to make decisions about them.
Creatures and Enemies
The monsters are shadowy creatures that appear from a rift in the dimension. They are creepy, otherworldly, and mysterious. They look like creatures that could belong to our world, but corrupted and strange.
However, there are also summons which are on your side, helping you fight back the shadowy forces.
One of the goals for designing the creatures is to design at least one that is cute enough to use as a mascot for the game. We settled on the cat with antlers being our mascot—she appears in many ads, as well as being the tutorial character.
Witch Arcana: Magic School!
The result of 9 months of my teams hard work is Witch Arcana: Magic School. It’s now available on the Android and IOS store. I’m very proud of this project, as I felt like with the limitations that we were working with, we were able to create a stylish game that was very smart about where it used its resources.
