In 2014, independent developer Inglenook Games announced Witchmarsh, a 1920s-set RPG - platformer hybrid that blended Jazz Age style with Lovecraft-inspired horror. The game was quickly funded on Kickstarter, but the two-person team encountered setbacks related to the scope of the game, its unique fusion of RPG and platforming elements, and more. About a year ago, the team pivoted to Tea Party of the Damned, a self-contained prelude to Witchmarsh set in a creepy underground realm deep beneath the city of Boston.
Game Rant spoke to Witchmarsh and Tea Party of the Damned writer and game designer Luciano Sgarbi about the development process of both games, the quirky Lovecraftian world of Tea Party of the Damned, his struggles with writer's block, and much more. Sgarbi discusses how Witchmarsh evolved from the simple pitch of "Baldur's Gate but with platforming" to what it is today, how Tea Party of the Damned sets itself apart from the main title, and which 1920s elements he was able to incorporate into the game's underground setting. He also offers advice to other indie game developers on the subject of battling burnout, keeping expectations realistic, and why sometimes shrinking the scope of a game isn't such a bad idea after all. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: When did you decide to pivot from the main Witchmarsh title to working on Tea Party of the Damned? What was that process like?
Sgarbi: It happened about two years ago. We were just kind of tired of pushing that boulder up that endless hill. We would work all day, and then we would kind of sit back and look, and we'd still just be so far from releasing anything. It really was down, in terms of motivation. And then we had this idea of taking this standalone story that was smaller and a lot more manageable in scope. It takes place, for example, all underground. So there's no day and night system, there's no time progressing, and a bunch of other things that you don't have to worry about when everything's just set in a big mega-dungeon. And it really just went from there.
The game was originally the prelude, even. It was going to be a free demo. That was the idea - maybe like 40 minutes long, just kind of act as a demo for the main game. But, as these things tend to do, the scope ran away from us. And we started to realize that this really deserved to be a game in its own right, even if it does connect to Witchmarsh further down the line.
Q: Where does Tea Party of the Damned fall in the Witchmarsh timeline - is it a prequel, or during the main campaign?
Sgarbi: It's before. So, in Witchmarsh, you control a team of private investigators who are setting off from Boston to the sleepy town of Witchmarsh up in the northeast of Massachusetts - in a sort of fictional country we've created. And so, they're already recruited, they're on their way, they arrive in town and things start to get weird.
In Tea Party of the Damned, you can be the same team of investigators, but you're arriving to interview for the job to go out and investigate Witchmarsh - and everything goes wrong. Firstly, the interview's a complete disaster. And then, as you're leaving past the Boston Harbor, you're pulled into a strange tea tent, and drugged and hexed by a bunch of warlocks, then robbed and thrown into Boston Harbor. And you wake up in the underworld. There may be some hypnotism involved, too, regarding an eldritch bracelet that the tea seller is holding.
So the two campaigns are kind of linked together, because the events may be slightly linked to the events in Witchmarsh - we'll see when both campaigns are out in the future. But you won't be required to play through this for the main game to make sense. But the two compliment each other, and the one leads to the other in quite a satisfying way, I think.
Q: There are several characters players can choose from in Tea Party of the Damned. What can you tell us about them? Do you have any particular favorites?
Sgarbi: There are twelve playable characters planned, and there are eight functional in the game at the moment. We've decided to just stop there for now. But, we launch in Early Access later this year - we've just finished doing the road map! - and we've got four major content patches planned, which will add in the remaining four investigators.
It's so hard to choose a favorite, but because I always lean towards druidic sorts of magic in RPGs, I like The Guardian. She's not actually part of the original lineup of eight. She's coming in a future early access patch. She's actually the only non-human investigator - she's a wood spirit, kind of like a Dryad, who's disguised herself as a private investigator. And now you have to figure out what her motives are, as you move through [the game,] and why she's joined your investigation.
Q: I was really drawn to the Trapper - I tend to favor stealthy gameplay.
Sgarbi: Yeah, she's kind of like the sniper class, more than a classic rogue. But all the characters will be able to stealth, and there are a few - well, more than a few - that kind of lend themselves to it. The Innkeeper is a good candidate for being a stealth-type character, because she's a sort of rapid-hitting melee brawler.
Q: So, how does character selection work - will you be sticking with the same party throughout the game, or does it switch up?
Sgarbi: You can have a party of up to four, but you stick with the same four characters throughout the game. But, with there being twelve [characters], if you want to play with every single character, you could play the game three times with three different parties. There's a character creation sandbox, where there's a shared pool of attributes, abilities, and talents. But certain characters have easier access to certain ability scores. So there are four or five different ability schools, and different characters can unlock certain abilities quicker than others.
Q: One of the characters that I really want to know more about is the talking can of oysters - what can you tell me about him?
Sgarbi: So, he originally started as a talking skeleton, and we were like, it's not quite weird enough. It's been done a lot. And he's going to be the game's main [guide]. He wakes you up when you wake up in the underworld, and offers to be your guide. I don't actually remember where the idea came from - but he's a talking can of oysters. And he claims to be a human who is trapped, who has been sort of bewitched. He got into some racing debt, and borrowed money from the wrong people. And he ended up being sent into the underworld along with you.
Only, he has the disadvantage of not being able to walk anywhere. He can roll. So he can't quite get around, but he does claim to know how to get the antidote to the thing you were drugged with. And also, he claims to know the way out. So he's a pretty good, if slightly unreliable, guide. Slightly untrustworthy. Rough. You can carry him in your backpack, and he gets really snug in there. And we added a little icon to the top left corner. It's like a group status effect. So you can click it and talk to him at any time - a little bit like in Undertale where you get the cell phone, and you can talk on the phone to the main characters, but he's in your bag, and he pops out and adds little quips and things. I feel like 90% of the branching dialogue was based around him and carrying him with you, and some of his escapades as well.
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Q: You mentioned Undertale - can you tell us about some of the other things that inspired Witchmarsh and Tea Party of the Damned?
Sgarbi: Because the project's been going on for so long, obviously, we've been inspired by different things at certain points along the way. Originally, when we first started making the game, I had really just rediscovered reading again. I hadn't read a book for about five years. Not since just after I got out of high school, really. So I started reading HP Lovecraft again. I got really into the 1920s Lovecraftian cosmic horror setting. I think that's what inspired us to go for that setting to begin with.
But the original pitch for the game that I made to my friend Joe, when he said he wanted to make a game with me, was that it would be kind of like Baldur's Gate or the Wizardry Cosmic Forge trilogy games, but as an action platformer. So they were another two big influences. But of course, we've been inspired by the Shadowrun Returns trilogy. That's absolutely fantastic. It's shaped a lot of my writing, and my writing style, and how we've approached the branching dialogue. And finally, most recently, of course, Baldur's Gate 3, because that's shown us what a truly great modern CRPG can deliver.
Q: Did the HP Lovecraft inspiration also lead to the choice of a northern/north-eastern US setting?
Sgarbi: Yeah, I think so. I'm naturally drawn to colder, spookier places. I know the South is quite a rich setting for this sort of thing. We've been playing a lot of Hunt: Showdown, which is set in the bayou, in the 1890s I think. But I come from West Yorkshire in the north of England, which is very cold and damp and dark. So I am always kind of going to be drawn to more Northern climates.
Q: So what can you tell us about the setting of Tea Party of the Damned - the game takes place underground, right?
Sgarbi: So, we've always had in the main game - because I'd written the entire story, and actually implemented it in the main Witchmarsh campaign - a separate underground dimension that's a little bit inspired by the DND Underdark. And it's called the Crawlspace, and a lot of people use it as a shortcut to get around the surface world. But it's another dimension that you need to be attuned to. Not anybody can just go down to it. The idea of setting an entire campaign in this sort of underground nightmare world just seemed like a good fit, and it ties in with the main story quite well as well.
Q: You compared the setting to the DND Underdark - any chance of being attacked by a beholder down there?
Sgarbi: Probably not, because we're trying to keep the scope small - we don't want people to encounter epic monsters in this first little introduction. There is a recently created god on the loose. It's very, very new and very angry. That will be in the background in various places and sort of hovering around - but that probably will be a boss encounter for a future Witchmarsh game.
Q: With Tea Party of the Damned taking place underground, how do you incorporate elements of the 1920s setting - Prohibition, jazz music, etc.?
Sgarbi: Well, speaking of Prohibition, there is like a saloon or speakeasy in the village. It's, I think, about 200 miles below Boston Harbor, so one of the characters remarks that at least they don't have to worry about Prohibition agents knocking on the front door.
That's another thing - the way that the tone of this game differs from the main game. Because the main Witchmarsh campaign, your hub for the game is this small 1920s town with Ford Model Ts and jazz music and Prohibition in full swing. It's set in the mid-1920s. Loads of NPCs. I think I've created over 300 NPCs and NPC encounters for the main game.
But in the prelude, for company, you have three monsters: a jelly man, a giant moth man, and a lich. Plus a talking can of oysters, a saloon keeper who seems to be the only human around you, and a ghost butler. So really, there's not much scope for 1920s things happening. But, on the other hand, that complements quite well, because I think it would be quite boring if it was incredibly 1920s-centric, and then you went to the main game, and that was 1920s-centric as well. So we have those two sort of flavors running parallel to each other. This one's more Lovecraft than Gatsby, for example.
Q: It sounds like the Lovecraft vibes are really present throughout Tea Party of the Damned.
Sgarbi: Oh yeah. I would say that the two flavors we are going for were HP Lovecraft and PG Wodehouse. He's one of my favorite authors. I would say that the main game deals more with the 1920s themes and being in a society, and that kind of thing. Whereas Tea Party of the Damned is very much, you know: "This place is horrific." And we're slowly being banished to this realm. If we don't find an antidote...well. We need to get back to the real world, now.
Q: But one thing you are able to work in was jazz music, right? I've listened to the soundtrack for Tea Party of the Damned, and I absolutely love it.
Sgarbi: Yeah. It's a full jazz soundtrack. The composer, Francisco, has done an amazing job. He actually got funding from the Chilean government. He's from Chile. He got a grant from the Chilean government to record about eight or nine tracks in a studio with a full jazz band. So, I think about half the tracks will be digital, and about half the tracks will actually be recorded by a band. During Early Access, we hope to get them back in the studio, off our own backs, and get more of these songs recorded. The soundtrack's coming along fantastically.
Q: Can you talk a bit about the development process of the original Witchmarsh, and some of the struggles you experienced?
Sgarbi: This is really our first game that we've made. We've worked together in 3D modeling and 3D animation, as freelancers. And we gel. We had quite a bit of experience in Game Maker, which is what we're still using now. So we created this prototype before we started the Kickstarter, and the prototype played amazingly, and we just thought: Oh. All we have to do is launch the Kickstarter, maybe get a few more people to help us, and we'll just build this prototype into a full game.
But then, as our knowledge of game development increased, we sort of realized that what we'd taken on as two developers was just far beyond any sort of reasonable scope for a game two people should be creating. And yeah, we ran into problems almost immediately after the Kickstarter. We did our best to be transparent with our backers as to what these problems were. Mainly, it was to do with RPG systems, which are incredibly complicated and difficult to get all speaking with each other.
Ranged combat was the biggest bugbear, for example. If there's one character here, and there are a bunch of enemies over there, but you want to snipe somebody at the back, how do you get the bullet through? Because it's not a top-down game, like a lot of CRPGs are, it's a platform game. So how do you get that bullet to pass through all the targets you don't want it to hit, and hit the enemy at the back that you're trying to snipe? That was, for example, one of the biggest stalling points. It probably took like six or seven months of development time to remake all the ranged combat from scratch. And, in fact, we've ended up essentially remaking the whole game from scratch during the cycle. It's been a learning experience, but we've realized we were very naive going into it. But we're also committed to sticking with it and getting it done.
Q: What advice would you give to other game developers going through similar struggles?
Sgarbi: I think the important thing is to just ride it out. You know, these things, these feelings, don't last forever, and they tend to come in waves. Rather than being one stream of motivation, a desire to get this done, we've had sort of waves where we thought: Can we even do this? Should we be doing this? But, eventually, things even out. For us, we're very lucky to have family supporting us. Without them, we couldn't have made it this far. With writer's block, for me, my go-to solution is to watch Kiki's Delivery Service. There are just fantastic notes in there about what to do when you feel like all your creativity is just gone. You've got to not struggle against it, not fight against it. Just go with the flow.
Q: So, you were feeling this loss of motivation working on the main game - did that change when you pivoted to Tea Party of the Damned?
Sgarbi: Absolutely. It was a huge relief. We started on it a few months before we announced it. I think we announced it about a year ago to our backers. I think it was last May. Because we announced it after a local game show called GaMaYo, where game developers can show other game developers what they're working on. Right after that. Last May, we announced that we were switching to Tea Party of the Damned, and it was just a huge weight off our shoulders to know that we've done all this work on the main game, and that's not going anywhere. It's still actually part of the same project files as Tea Party of the Damned, because it's the same engine. That's not going anywhere.
And I'm still working away at it - but now, rather than taking on this enormous opus, we're doing the small, deliverable, accomplishable thing. We've got this big list of features that we don't have to worry about. And we're also going for Early Access, which makes it a little bit more accomplishable in that first deliverable version. I can't emphasize enough how much of a relief it was, and how much of a boost to our motivation, and how much that helped our output in the months after that.
Q: What was the response from your Kickstarter backers when you announced Tea Party of the Damned?
Sgarbi: It was, I'd say, mostly positive. But there was a lot of skepticism. With Kickstarter, we've found there's a lot of negativity - quite justifiably so - in a game that's been funded and hasn't been delivered yet. Ten years on, I kind of get it - we get where they're coming from. But I think, overall, people understood. We even had some people encouraging us to make the scope even smaller. For example, in the initial announcement, we announced that cooperative multiplayer would probably be in the first version of Early Access. And we had a software developer in the comments saying: You know, why don't you just put that in an Early Access patch a little bit further on, so you can get this single-player experience out to people faster? We took that on board, and it's now something that we'll be delivering down the line in Early Access.
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Q: So what does your roadmap look like for the first few months, once Tea Party of the Damned is released?
Sgarbi: We've got an idea of the main content beats that we want to have through Early Access. That's on our roadmap, which we should be releasing sometime in the next few months. But each major patch would add in one of the playable characters and themed content around that character. So, we're thinking about spending probably like 12-15 months in Early Access for Tea Party of the Damned before everything shifts back to the main game. But, as I've said in some of our Kickstarter updates, pretty much everything we make for Tea Party of the Damned - spells, characters, some of the enemies, some of the backgrounds - all carry on into Witchmarsh, the main game. So, by working on Tea Party of the Damned, and by adding multiplayer, for example, that is working on the main game as well.
Q: So, what's next for the main game once Tea Party of the Damned has been released and made its way through Early Access?
Sgarbi: I've taken quite a bit of a break on it. So I need to get back and investigate all of those story files, and play through all the NPCs and the branching dialogue. But I'm optimistic, actually. I think the story of the main game delivers some things that the story of the prelude can't, with it being only about 13 hours long. There's a bit of, you know, social commentary about the 1920s. I've dipped back in every now and then because I have a story project which has all the project files for Tea Party of the Damned and the main game. And I just deliver that to Joe, who has the most up-to-date project, and he sort of inserts them in as I'm building them. So I've been dipping back in and sort of having a look and being like: "Oh, this cutscene needs a bit of polish," and just doing that up again. So it's not like it's been on the shelf for a year now. I have been dipping back in and taking a look at it.
Q: We haven't talked about enemies or bosses yet - have you got any favorites in Tea Party of the Damned?
Sgarbi: Oh, I love the sea urchins. We have these horrible trans-dimensional urchins. They've arrived in this underworld via a sewer system that was originally part of an alien city in another dimension. And the sewer system's just kind of, for whatever reason, been cut out of that dimension and got into this one. And it's brought with it these horrific sea urchins that are quite large. They're about as big as a human. And we haven't put it in the game yet, but I have a plan. They're currently a turret-style enemy, so they just stand there spitting at you. But we have a plan to input some way of uprooting them so they can walk around on the little suction pads that urchins have. That'd be very cute as well.
I'm also very fond of the jelly men. There's a type of enemy that's like a hooded jelly man, and they can make weapons out of their jelly tentacles. They can make maces and swords and things out of their tentacles, and they're pretty horrific, but I love them as well.
I hinted in the Steam Page to a "streetwise fire elemental as well." I don't know if we've actually shown pictures of this. But there's a fire elemental dressed in a full three-piece suit with pinstripes. He does the little hand snap and everything. He's a very dapper guy.
Q: I like the moth man - I'm from the South, got a lot of pride in our local cryptid.
Sgarbi: Yeah, he's part of the entourage of the speakeasy. So the owner of the speakeasy has these three hired goons. One of them used to be human, but they're all monsters now. So there's a jelly man, a lich, and a giant moth man. The moth man, he's - he means well. He's got a big heart.
Q: What advice would you give to players trying out Tea Party of the Damned, especially those who might not be as familiar with the genre?
Sgarbi: I would say feel free to investigate all the characters and explore the branching dialogue. You might find discrepancies and things that don't quite add up in some of the characters' stories, or reasons why they're there. So, everybody, each of the main characters, has their own sort of motivation. You can dig into that.
The way I've structured the cutscenes is that the cutscenes you have to play through are very short, but then afterward, there's a lot of branching dialogue you can go into if you want to. If you want to, you can explore all of that, or you can just be like, "Right, okay," and just get straight back to fighting jelly men.
Q: There's a detective character - I'm assuming he's very good at figuring out those discrepancies and hidden motivations?
Sgarbi: Yeah, there's a PI. Very recently, I was re-reading the copy on the Steam page, and it says you can interrogate the world's denizens as the PI. But I felt like I'd let that premise down a little bit, because all it really resulted in was a few extra dialogue bits. Because every character has their own unique extra little flavorful choices, and unique things they can say in dialogue just to give the game some replayability.
What I've been doing recently is adding in a separate layer to all the conversations, an actual interrogation. A spotlight on this character. We're going to grill them and find out everything they know. It's a specific kind of mechanic, as it were, just for the PI. So that's going in like, now. I'm really enjoying writing this hard-boiled detective - you know, putting the screws into, say, a talking shrew, and trying to find out what this mouseman knows and where it comes from.
Q: Ooh, I love that. What would you say is his style - is he a Sherlock Holmes, a Columbo?
Sgarbi: He's very much kind of a hard-boiled Chester Himes-style PI, you know. Shoot first, ask questions later. No time for nonsense. He tends to see through peoples' bluster. He gets a plus 10 bonus to the Craft attribute in dialogue. Even if you don't have a spell caster on your team who can work with things like logic, he can see when people are telling him fibs. He's very much a stereotypical 1930s Rex Banner-style hard-boiled, fast-speaking detective.
Q: You're shooting for a 2024 Early Access release for Tea Party of the Damned, is that correct?
Sgarbi: Yeah, probably about fall onwards. The first priority is to have a backer test. We need to get the game out in stages to the backers. We're getting closer every week. It's really exciting to be this close to releasing something after so long. Really exciting.
Q: Anything else you'd like to let Game Rant's readers know?
Sgarbi: Check out the brand-new trailer, if you haven't seen it already! Check out our Steam page, wishlist it if you're looking forward to it. We just hope it delivers, because I don't think anyone has done a CRPG in a sort of 2D platform viewpoint before.
[END]
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