Witch’s Shop – A Twine Game

Started in April of 2020, “Witch’s Shop” is an in-development text-based game using Twine.

The game is currently in alpha.

The button above opens a new tab to itch.io where Witch’s Shop is hosted.

The premise of the game is that you play as a witch who runs a shop. However, you’ve recently run out of goods and have to explore the woods, the sea, and the village to restock your wares.
It is a low-stress, low-stakes game, meant to focus on exploring the world and characters in it.
Playtime runs around 15 to 30 minutes on average.
The game itself has been written in Twine, using Harlowe 3.1.0.
- The second version will be reformatted to SugarCube 2.30.0, still using Twine.
The game’s name hasn’t been decided yet! If you have suggestions, I’ll gladly take them! (Needless to say, I’ll credit you if I end up using your suggestion.)
Once the game is released to the general public, I intend on it being free to play, with an option to donate.

Witch’s Shop has taken a backseat lately, especially since having started working full-time for EA as Development Support as of last August.
I’ve done research into how Twine games written with SugarCube differ from Harlowe, and unfortunately the lack of markup is dissuading, as I’m still a beginner when it comes to coding.
- Because of this, I may wait to find a different program similar to Twine that would work for what I have in mind, or I may try to implement some sort of patch that adds markup to SugarCube.
In short, I don’t expect to have any major updates or new versions of Witch’s Shop for a while.
- Still, it’s been an incredible project to have worked on, and every ounce of encouragement and feedback has helped fuel that process, and gives me hope for continuing through the next big step for this project.

Thank you so much to everyone who’s offered their feedback! You’ve all been so generous with your time and suggestions, and I’m excited to move onto the next phase of making this game.
Here are some of the next steps I’ll work on for this next phase:
- The main bulk of the work will go towards adding more options for dialogue and lengthier conversations between characters and the player. These dialogues will be optional, but will exist for people who are interested in learning and interacting more with the characters in the village, and building up more of a relationship between them.
- The above will be done through the game taking place over several in-game days.
- Additionally, more romance options will be written.
- The game will end with being able to make potions, including optional potions if you choose to collect optional resources along the way.
- Work will be made towards implementing an inventory UI and a way to track your progress towards collecting resources.
- Moving forward, I’ll be working with SugarCube in Twine rather than Harlowe.
Thank you again to everyone who’s offered their time and encouragement along this process.
If you want to be a part of the next round of testing (whether or not you were able to participate in the first round), please submit your email here. I’ll send out the second version once it’s ready for testing.

I’ve sent out the game to everyone who signed up to participate in the first round of feedback.
I’m asking for all feedback surveys (i.e. the two of them) to be completed by July 7th.
I’ll be incorporating feedback into the next version of the game before releasing the next updated version to be play tested.
If you want to sign up to participate in the second round of feedback, sign up via the link in bold above.

I’ve worked on some visual formatting/styling of the game, which, at the moment, is quite simple – just text on a solid background.
The map (as seen above) has remained largely unchanged – just a couple additions to pathing options.
Though I had hoped to have the game ready in alpha by this time, unfortunately it’s not quite ready yet. Given the overwhelming circumstances going on around the world in addition to my poor mental health recently, I haven’t been working as fast on the game as I’d hoped.
That said, I am aiming/hoping to release the alpha version close to the end of this month.
I want to offer tremendous thanks to anyone who’s offered to test it, or asked about its progress. You help keep me accountable and encourage me to finish this project, which I very well might not otherwise.

The pathing is done!
This is a quick snapshot of the layout overall (zoomed out so as to avoid spoilers).
I have no clue how many different paths you can take to complete the game, but it does only have one ending. However, the emphasis of the game is very much on the journey you take to get there.
With my current rate of progress, I’m hoping to have an alpha version ready by mid-June, which will be sent to everyone who’s signed up for the first round of play testing.