Greetings, dwellers of the World Wide Web! Welcome to the first official blog post for our game – Daughter of Crone. This might be the first time that you have heard of it, so I will make a short introduction. Daughter of Crone is a retro-style RPG game, where you play as a young witch living in a medieval fantasy kingdom. The core gameplay consists of the main character exploring the world, growing magical herbs, brewing potions and building relationships. As the game progresses the player will make choices that impact the story in a meaningful way. It is a game that combines fantasy RPG elements with certain parts of a cozy farming simulation game, but the focus is more on the story and world exploration. The setting and story are also intended for a more mature audience, which is not something you would usually associate with cozy games. As the marketing manager, I am also obligated to tell you to wishlist our game on Steam.

I am the entity that calls itself Erkenmormel. I am the lead artist and narrative designer of this game. Today I want to take you on a little journey through the origins of our project and the team behind it. Since I am mostly a visual person, I will leave the technical details to a minimum. I hope my partner will be able to share his programming secrets but that will be an adventure for another day.

This three-part blog series will briefly go over the origin story of our game and the team behind it. The first part will describe how everything started. The second part will tell you what kind of hurdles we have faced during our journey. The third part will be about the more recent developments and our plans for the future.

I am not sure if this blog will become a regular thing. I am mostly writing this for myself and I doubt that too many people would be interested in what I have to say. Blogs are a thing of the past. Today’s content landscape seems to be all about short videos, fast cuts and silly little dances. I am too old for that! I expect to gain no exposure or website traffic from writing this blog. But I do hope that someone out there might find it interesting, amusing or educational. With that said, let’s get on with the story.

Our team

Daughter of Crone is made by a team of two – one artist and one programmer. We are a married couple from Finland and we call ourselves Jinxed Bird. We have done a few game projects before but Daughter of Crone will be our first commercial release.

I am in charge of art, project management, writing and marketing. My partner assists me in the game’s art and writing and he also does programming and everything tech-related. We do game design together. When we need sounds, we mostly use what free or affordable stuff we find or try to compose something by ourselves.

My partner balances his time between a full-time job and our game project. As a recently graduated game artist, I am extremely unemployed and – for now – can dedicate my full attention to the development of our game. Our life situation lands us somewhere between professionals and hobbyists in terms of resources. But we do hope to be able to go all in one day and do game development full-time. At the moment we are working with a very small budget and trying to make the best of what we have.

How it started

Daughter of Crone began as a school project. Until very recently, I was a student at a Finnish University of Applied Sciences. I became something called “Medianomi”, which is the title given to people who get a degree in communication. We can do all sorts of things from journalism to graphic design but I have taken a focus in game art. If you are interested in how the Finnish higher education system works, you can find a detailed explanation here.

As the last milestone before graduation, we have to make a final project. This project can be anything really, as long as it is something that includes some form of visual design. As my final quest, I decided that I wanted to make a game. Because I have no skills in programming, I asked my partner to help me. He liked the idea for the game and graciously accepted. At the time it seemed like a perfectly realistic project for the two of us. We thought it would be something that we could finish in a year. How foolish we were!

Game idea

My game idea began to form when I was in a game development course in school. In that course, we were making a bicycle racing game for Android. It wasn’t the kind of game I would like to play and I had some challenges keeping myself motivated for the duration of the course. When that course finally finished, I was left feeling extremely unsatisfied. I wanted to create something that would be interesting to me, something that had an actual story and a beautiful world that the player could get lost inside. I started to visualize all the fantastic games I would like to make and that daydreaming eventually led to some sort of a vision.

It all started with just the idea of two characters: a young and an old woman. They were standing in a forest glade, where an ancient tree stood. Creatures made of pale lights were dancing on the edges of the glade and it was raining heavily.

Gradually a whole world began to form around this vision. The old woman became the wise woman known as Gudrun and the younger woman her student, Eyfrid. The old tree became the Cronetree. I was coming up with names for the sheep farmers, the village priest and the king. I was writing grand plotlines, as well as small and intimate moments with the villagers. I was excited to be building the kingdom of Ervein.

It is very hard to come up with original ideas in this day and age. When it comes to something like games, a lot of elements are borrowed. I believe that most modern games have a formula “something old with something new”. When it came time to start thinking about the actual gameplay, I simply wanted to fill the game with things I liked from other games. A pinch of cozy from farming simulators, a bit of dark romance and a branching narrative from well-known roleplaying games and turn-based combat from the Eastern classics. Thinking about these concepts together may seem like quite the hodgepodge. I wasn’t too worried about it at the time. I guess my reasoning was that “because we like all of these things, they must work well together”. Had I known anything at all about the game market I might have approached the game design very differently.

Other games were not my only inspiration. I read a lot of fantasy books and love to go on wikipedia binges on topics such as folklore, paganism, medieval medicine, and religion. A lot of the herbs in the game can be found in the real world. Some of the characters in village Vilgesby were inspired by people I have met. Some of them were older but well-loved characters of mine that had been waiting in the back of my mind to be let out again.

We had a massive bag of ideas and plans for our game. But it would be a wholly different thing to start making these ideas a reality. In the next chapter of our blog, I will tell you how everything started out and what the first year of development was like.

Until later,

Erkenmormel