Hi everyone, Arimia speaking!! First off, thank you so much for playing Witch You Want - over 10,000 people have already met Mirabelle which is just amazing to think about.

For those of you that don't know, Witch You Want was made during the month of September, 2024 as an internal yuri game jam here at Studio Élan. It was a team of 3 people - myself, the writer Natasha, and the character artist Dani. Together we made Witch You Want in about 3-4 weeks. Today I want to share a few snippets from our postmortem that we just released!

Witch You Want started from the very simple concept - I like witches. Growing up, I didn't care much for the antiquated overly scary witches, but rather those that were designed to be more beautiful (or at least, more realistic). I've always loved the thought of a magical character wearing flowing gowns, large hats and the like - not necessarily a magical girl, but rather someone who wasn't tied to superhero-esque duties. All of that's to say, I like witches.

I've always wanted to try my hand at making a customizable protagonist x love interest type of game, and making the player have to help a witch sounded like a great excuse for a plot. When caps and Theo pitched the idea of doing an internal game jam, I was excited, and refined this idea into something feasible for the time frame. We constrained the game to only take place over a single week with the only 2 characters shown being Mirabelle and the player character. Making sure the game could be finished in less than a month was my top priority while planning the game - after all, if it can't be done during the game jam, then it won't get done for the game jam.

Natasha offered to do the writing, so I'll let her talk for a bit on her process.

Hi, I'm Natasha, the writer of Witch You Want!

While I've helped out with a lot of projects as an editor and have made and directed my own games, this was my first time writing a full script for someone else's project. Writing a game without also having to program it was a nice change of pace. The Garden Variety jam happened shortly after another jam I participated in, Velox Fabula 2, which is ten days long with a required theme that's only announced when it starts; I led a team where I did both the writing and programming. After that, doing a month-long jam where I only had to write the script felt more like a vacation than anything else.

It helped a lot that the scope for WYW was always pretty narrowly defined: about a week of potionmaking, plus the intro and festival and descriptions for the ingredients. At least writing-wise, it wasn't at any real risk of ballooning completely out of control like a lot of projects do. I also wrote the "perfect" path first and left stuff like failed potions and the bad endings for later; the idea was that if I ended up being too busy or got sick then there would still be a complete game, but it would let you redo the potion indefinitely until you got the correct recipe.

Aside from doing the writing, I loved being able to see the progress made on other parts of the game too. Dani's designs for Mirabelle and the MC are all so cute, and Ari did a great job combining everything into a game we can all be proud of. I’ve been so glad to see everyone’s reaction to Mirabelle! I tried really hard to balance “you wouldn’t want Mirabelle as your RL boss” with “but she’s cute enough to want to date in a game” so it’s really satisfying to know that most players have enjoyed her.

As for the art of Witch You Want, we decided on a purple color scheme very early on. Something bright, fun, and whimsical. That's where Dani comes in, as the character artist! I'll let her explain their work process.

For the designs I was super happy to lean into such a whimsical girly look for Mirabelle. Looking through the inspiration images of Lolita/Victorian fashion, I knew I wanted to design something frilly and celestial with strong motifs. I also wanted to make sure that she looked outright elegant and charming, but have enough youthfulness in her design that you could understand her clumsy playful side too just by looking at her.

If you want to read more of the postmortem, check it out here! Either way, thank you for all of the support!

— Arimia