The Magic Bookstore is a cozy, wholesome game about a witch who has inherited their Grandmother’s bookstore. Upon arrival, it is in a complete state of disarray and it is your responsibility to clean and manage it using your magic! However, the magic in the town seems to be weakened and you must find a way to rekindle the magic restore the town of Lindow to its former glory.
I have been working on this game with my good friend Colin Harris since August 2023 as our first attempt of a creating a game as a product with the intent to sell it. We have been marketing it early on by going to local events to get playtest feedback and to grow a community around our game so when it releases, we have players eager to play! As of Dec. 2024 we have attended 5 events including:, OMGCon! (Owensboro, KY), TORG Gaming Convention (Columbus, OH), and we plan to have our game shown at MAGFest and Lexington Comic and Toy in 2025.
We always keep a live demo on our itch page and post updates to our instagram
Art Direction
One of my responsibilities in this project is the technical art. One of the first interactions we had with live player feedback was a young girl playing the game, while her father read the dialogue. It reminded us of parents reading their children a bed time story, but in a new and modern way. We leaned hard into that idea and made our game look and feel as much like a storybook as possible including page flip scene transitions, side-by-side dialogue, and an art direction that is reminiscent of the golden era of Disney animation (1940s). We also didn’t want to limit ourselves to a 2D environment, so we created our game in 3D but we use stylistic shaders and an orthographic camera. This makes our game look like a 2D, hand-drawn storybook, while maintaining immersive 3D environments and physics.
Forest environment featuring crosshatched shadows.
Colin and I are both programmers by trade, so we knew we would need some help in the art department. Luckily, Colin is married to a fantastic writer, Alyssa Coon-Harris, who is writing the story of the game which is essential for creating the storybook charm. We met our artist, Rachel Kyle at OMGCon in Owensboro, and she does fantastic work creating our characters which are what truly give our game the story book look.
Casting a spell on books to clean them up!
Dialogue with Liliana. Notice the unique placement of the text. Most games put this at the bottom third of the screen, but our choice is reminiscent of a storybook having the text intertwined or next to the illustration