Today I want to talk a little bit about how constraints breed creativity and how Heartspell’s overall storyline was shaped by some early decisions around art and scope.
As a general note, I looooooooove creative constraints. When it comes to game design or writing or running TTRPGs or art, I’m a huge fan of starting with goals or constraints or something to put a little direction or pressure into the creative process.
I’m notorious for coding up prompt generators for everything from short stories to TTRPG characters to Inktober because I love starting from something I don’t completely control. Constraints like the one I’m talking about today aren’t limitations for me, they’re inspirations.
So (light spoiler for the first five minutes of Heartspell), Heartspell takes place at a magical academy that is run entirely by an all-powerful headmaster. He uses powerful magic to run things and the school has a lot of enchantments that write schedules and grade exams and that sort of thing.
We took some inspiration from Naomi Novik’s AMAZING Scholomance series here. The central storyline of Heartspell revolves around the headmaster’s disappearance and the danger that arises out of that. We love that story, but the reason we landed there comes from a more pragmatic angle.
Heartspell is a dating game. We’ve got a lot of other stuff going on, but at the heart of the experience is romantic bonds with the cast of characters. And as a lil’ two-person indie team we need to be very efficient and thoughtful with what we’re spending our time on.
Which means we can’t spend time on art for teachers because either:
- You can date the teachers. That’s not a dynamic one we wanted to touch.
- You can’t date the teachers. We wanted as many adorable wizards to date as possible, which means not spending art resources on characters you can’t date.
So, if we didn’t want uncomfortable teacher-dating stories and we didn’t want to spend art on non-datable characters well then I guess there can’t be teachers. That decision set the constraints for the story we were going to tell, which I’m very happy with.