I want to talk about this a bit more in depth, because the original poster was so right. When I first started reading Witch Hat one of my first thoughts was that magic was just programming and visual logic, and how cool was that.
Flip a sign the wrong way in your spell? Maybe the flame would rocket in the opposite direction and you'd burn yourself to death. Scale a component too large on your quire? Take out an unsuspecting wall. I feel like without the proper understanding it would be so, SO easy to cause mayhem with the witch hat magic system, and it's incredible that Richeh is only crystalizing tables and Coco is just spraying people in the face. The long, straight lines on Coco's shoes causing wild speed boosts are a beautiful example of a tiny, innocent variable causing unexpected results.
Like, one time I fucked up and the player suddenly wasn't able to walk down a hallway; they were blocked by an invisible wall and no one could figure it out or pass through that region. When I eventually did track it down, it was an enormous set of invisible pants that I'd scaled 100x by accident. They were just hovering in the middle of the level, and the collision on those pants (the logic that causes you to stop at walls or not fall through the world) was causing a game breaking bug, all because I'd added two zeros by accident.
So every time I see Olly iterating on shit in his darkened room, stressing out about deadlines and not eating, I feel it my bones. Buddy is an auteur indie game dev, never leaving his apartment and stacking his energy drinks next to his desk, and Qifrey is the well-meaning partner who comes in with hummus and asks him to stretch lol
(Full clarity, I was an environment artist/level designer who sometimes wrote shit shaders, not a programmer-programmer, who are beautiful angels who save us all from our own bad choices - bless you, programmers)
