Uncommon Chemistry by boxcar012
It's the spooky season again and customers are turning up at your door step with potion orders. Fulfill their order by adding the ingredients to the cauldron, but sadly your "Guide to Potion Brewing" has been damaged over the years and recipes are missing ingredients. Make sure to keep the potion in balance otherwise, POOF! Who knows what will happen to you...
Keep the potion mixture in the middle, ingredients on the left shelf bring the mixture back to the left and visa versa.
Used Unity3D, Audacity, Asprite, and Soundbridge.
| Link | https://github.com/boxcar11/Uncommon-Chemistry |
| HTML5 | https://boxcar012.itch.io/ld-49 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/uncommon-chemistry |
Ratings
| Overall | 1501th | 2.5⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1493th | 2.318⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1439th | 2.477⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1307th | 2.833⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1249th | 2.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 849th | 2.929⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1094th | 2.344⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1267th | 2.816⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 6🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
Especially thanks for HTML5
I've restarted the game and gave it a new try. Because I had the feeling it would go forever I lost on purpose because I wanted to see whats happening.
In regards of what I mentioned here are some ideas how I could imagine how to solve it:
- If incredients are not dropped on top of the caudron then tween them back to their original position.
- Add some highlights to the caudron when the incredient is ready being dropped into it. May some particle effects or glow?
- You could make the game harder by increasing the influence of the incredients. I'd the feeling that I could really "finetune" the balanche
So I have some thoughts that are somewhat influenced by the fact that we both went similar directions in a lot of ways, so hopefully this helps you flesh this out further if that's what you're looking to do.
- I was honestly confused a lot of the time. I struggled to convey what makes a correct recipe myself so I understand how difficult it is. I don't have a very clear end-goal that makes sense aside from seeing the progress bar go one way or another, but how I got there was unclear. Even just adding some additional tutorial text to your page would help users who are testing your game.
- There's some buggyness you're probably already aware of. I couldn't get the potion list to open when I wanted it to, tooltip text would be stuck on screen and make some of the item names I'm hovering on innacurate, etc.
- I like the idea that potions are lost to time and you need to piece together what is missing. Maybe this could be further influenced by giving the player more information on what is included and why it works. In my game, there are 5 different potion types and ingredients have flavor text hints to tell you which they would be suited for (poppy flowers for sleep potions, etc.) If I had a better idea of what kind of potion I'm trying to make, the puzzle would feel less like blind luck.
- Some additional thoughts:
> - The meter on the cauldron made me think it was a temperature gauge. It would be cool to have to control the heat for the potion as well
> - You have a good start to the graphics here, I think it would benefit immensely from some animations as the potion becomes progressively better/worse
> - A button to dump out the potion and start again could be helpful (I should probably consider the same for mine lol)
Hope this helps! I think this is a strong effort that could be made better with some polish and additional playtesting.
Edit to add: I played the HTML5 version. I know bugs can be platform specific so I wanted to be sure I included that info.
The recipe book is a nice touch, but I wish I could bring the book back up because whenever I finished wit hthe first row, the second and the third row never shows up to help me brew my potion, so that's kinda unfortunate.