Weiqi Qu
(She/Her)
Hello, I am Weiqi Qu, a master’s student in Serious Games & VR. I am interested in game design, interactive experiences, and storytelling, especially how games can reflect social issues. Throughout my studies, I have been developing my skills in game design, interaction design, narrative design, and Unity development, while exploring how technology can create meaningful experiences. I enjoy turning ideas into interactive experiences and using games as a way to tell stories, encourage reflection, and connect people with different points of view.
Words make witch
Introduction
Words Make Witch is a role-playing game exploring how gameplay can help people understand the spread of rumors and the perspectives of different stakeholders in witch-hunting. Players step into the roles of different characters, receive incomplete information, and make choices about how that information is interpreted. As information passes between characters, small changes in words can gradually transform it into rumors, allowing players to experience how fear and different perspectives shape the spread of information. The project explores how role-playing and interactive storytelling can create opportunities to reflect on the social processes behind rumor propagation.
Design Process
Art Design
I settled on a dot-art-dominated visual style for the game art. To improve asset production efficiency, I used Gemini to create an HTML-based tool for visual style conversion, which allowed me to convert third party images into a consistent artistic style or draw new images directly. This approach not only ensured stylistic consistency across all visual assets but also accelerated asset production.
Narrative Design
Words Make Witch tells the story of a witch hunt through the eyes of three characters: Elspeth, the accused witch; the Villager, who becomes involved in the growing rumors; and Thomas, a politician who uses the situation for his own interests. The story is divided into five stages, starting with a strange event in the village, followed by the spread of rumors, growing fear and conflict, the witch hunt, and its final consequences. In each stage, players experience the story from different characters’ points of view and choose words to pass information to others. Small changes in these words can change how the story develops, leading to different endings based on the player’s choices.
Game Development
The main challenge in developing Words Make Witch was connecting the three characters’ perspectives with the typing mechanic and story animations. Instead of creating three separate storylines, I built one shared story structure that could show the same events from Elspeth, the Villager, and Thomas’s perspectives. The typing mechanic was then added to key parts of the story, allowing players to choose words and pass information between characters. These choices could change how the next character understands the event and how the story develops. I also connected the dialogue system with character animations and scene animations, so that specific story events could trigger different animations while the dialogue was playing. This allowed the story, typing interaction, and visual feedback to work together as one game experience.
In the end
Developing Words Make Witch has been an important part of my student journey. Through this project, I learned how to turn an idea into a complete experience, from story and gameplay design to development, testing, and improvement. More importantly, I learned to be patient with the process, accept mistakes, and keep improving when things did not go as planned.
This project also marks the end of an important stage of my student life. I am grateful to all the teachers, classmates, friends, and everyone who supported me along the way. Thank you for the feedback, encouragement, conversations, and memories that helped me grow as a designer. Words Make Witch is not only the result of this project, but also a small record of what I have learned and experienced throughout my student journey.
