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Creative Director, Lead Game Designer, Level Designer, Producer

Thesis Project

Casual, Horror, Cooking, Puzzle

Unity, GitHub

June to August 2025

My Role
My Role

Witch Way is a genre-blending game that combines cooking, horror, and casual gameplay. You become a Witch who cuts, crushes, spellbinds and mixes a wide variety of ingredients to create perfectly peculiar potions, all from a mysterious recipe book. The customers flock in to buy whatever potion they need, and you cook them up because rent is due!

However, once you run out of ingredients, you must enter the dreary Witching Zone. Avoid terrifyingly whimsical monsters and discover the hidden recipes scattered throughout the ever-changing dimension.

Notable Features

  • Recipe and Dialogue Puzzles

  • Unique Cooking Mechanics with emergent behaviour

  • Procedural Level Generation

  • Mix of Casual and Horror Genre

Brewing Potions

  • Prep Board

  • Tempature Pot

  • Arcane Circle

  • Cauldron

Witching Zone

The purpose of the Witching Zone is exploration and ingredient gathering. Players venture into this horrific area to search, gather,  dodge, and solve puzzles. This part emphasizes the horror, anxiety and vulnerability of the player as enemies cannot be attacked. 

The Level design draws inspiration from The Legend of Zelda and The Binding of Isaac, particularly in its approach to procedural generation and map discovery.  Each run generates a unique layout composed of pre-designed room types, including enemy encounters, reward rooms, puzzle spaces, landmarks, dead ends, and exit rooms. Rooms support varying numbers of entrances (one to four), allowing for diverse and interconnected layouts.

Within each level, additional procedural systems determine the placement of ingredients, enemy variations, and interactive elements, ensuring that each playthrough offers new challenges and discoveries.

To support this system, I collaborated with the Technical Director to develop a custom tool in Unity. This tool allowed me to efficiently create, assign types, and define event triggers, streamlining the level design workflow and enabling rapid iteration.

My Concept Art

Example of Process Work

DND dungeon maker to Unity White Box

Drawings on top to signify important places, any notable features

  • My Responsiblites

    Led a cross-disciplinary team of 25 to develop Witch Way, guiding the project from concept to a vertical slice.

    Defined and maintained the game’s overall theme, vision, and atmosphere, unifying tone, aesthetics, and gameplay feel.

    Built production timelines and Gantt charts, coordinating workflows through both waterfall and agile methods, while supporting team efficiency and morale.

    Designed and balanced core mechanics, puzzles, levels, and systems, ensuring engaging and cohesive gameplay.

    Developed and tested prototypes and iterative builds, refining design through continuous feedback.

    Authored and maintained the Game Design Document (GDD) to align cross-team collaboration.

  • What I've Learned

    Strengthening creative problem-solving, adapting ideas based on new information, and pivoting designs effectively using design thinking methods and research

    Improved understanding of player-to-computer interaction

    Implementation of feedback and constructive criticism into design iterations

    Increased knowledge of gameplay readability, flow, and player engagement

    Enhancing leadership and team management skills and tailoring communication for specific departments

  • Self Reflection

    Originally, Witch Way was meant to be a mechanics-heavy game, focusing on player–computer interaction and the juxtaposition between first-person hand movement and first-person body movement. During production, however, I lost sight of that vision as I shifted focus toward other departments to ensure the rest of the game was completed on time. My mistake was having too many people who have the same skills instead of finding dedicated team members for level design, UI asset creation, and timeline management. As a result, I began to feel overwhelmed by the amount of work that needed to be done compared to what I actually wanted to focus on.

    Even so, I’m proud of most of the mechanics in the game and plan to continue polishing and refining the overall game feel to achieve the vision I set out for.

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