Toil & Trouble by eveenova

[raw]
made by eveenova for Ludum Dare 49 (JAM)

A highly unstable potion-mixing game! Mix colorful ingredients into a potion you don't know how to make before it blows up!!

Consult the recipe book on the table. This will show you the color of your final potion. Each ingredient will add or subtract a color value to the cauldron when dropped in. Try to get as close as you can to the target recipe, but be careful many of the ingredients are unstable and the concoction may just blow up in your face!

  • WASD - Move
  • Space - Interact
  • Escape - Restart

Most of the programming: @hampster Pixel art & animation: @eveenova Design & etc: @hampster and @eveenova

3rd party credits: Background tileset from https://crazybirdladygames.itch.io/pixel-tavern-inn SFX from https://www.zapsplat.com/ BGM from https://opengameart.org/

Ratings

Overall 1206th 3.15⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1350th 2.775⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 895th 3.175⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Theme 765th 3.525⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Humor 907th 2.675⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Mood 741th 3.425⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Given 16🗳️ 17🗨️

Feedback

OctahedronSoftware
05. Oct 2021 · 09:59 UTC
I played for a while and only brews I managed to make was when I was supposed to make potion with one ingridient. Still, I do like the pixelart, music and idea.
Gus Goucher
05. Oct 2021 · 18:47 UTC
I wasn't able to figure out any potions. Maybe some kind of indication of what worked when making a potion might be nice! Great pixel art though!
LDJam user 139668
05. Oct 2021 · 18:56 UTC
Interesting idea, but hard to understand what colours should I mix, bcs game just says that color isn't right, but I can't see how exactly it's not right :(
LDJam user 236935
05. Oct 2021 · 18:58 UTC
Pixel art is great. Good stuff. Music's not too bad either. The tables need to be spaced out a little more though, it's a bit tight getting through them. Holding space to carry items was a bit odd, it feels like it should be a toggle to pick up/drop, but that's not a deal breaker. Good effort.
Binary Systems
05. Oct 2021 · 18:59 UTC
It took a minute to realize I should only pay attention to the colors on the tag, not the sprite, but once I realized that it was quite fun. Definitely a big difficulty range, though -- some potions end up made with a single ingredient, and sometimes it seems like making a given potion with the generated ingredients is impossible.

Do the 'elements' of each ingredient (i.e. [time], [gossip]) determine if a potion will explode? Couldn't tell.
bunchanurds
05. Oct 2021 · 19:13 UTC
Fun concept and really nice art! The level generation was a bit _unstable_ though!
Megastrons
05. Oct 2021 · 20:33 UTC
I liked the art, but the gameplay was confusing and unintuitive. I think the game should be more explanatory
LDJam user 271014
07. Oct 2021 · 06:32 UTC
Lovely pixel art! The presentation is great all around, it really does feel like a potion brewing game. Trying to get to a target color is a cool concept, though it was kinda frustrating when I was super close but the potion would just explode. I think a few more hints on which ingredients are unstable would help there. I had a good time experimenting and just seeing what effects certain ingredients had on the color.
OotOot
09. Oct 2021 · 21:06 UTC
The art and sound is definitely good. They work well together. The mechanic is difficult to grasp from the start. I understood the objective but I had trouble finding what everything meant in the item tooltip. I understood the plus symbol was used for color changing but I didn't understand what the negative symbol did, I presume it was the stability of the ingredient but could not figure out how the color affected it. Lastly although a bit nitpicky I think the collision on ingredients could be removed, it caused me some issues moving between the tables which affected how smoothly the game played.

Overall the game is quite good when I got familiar with it. If ignoring these simple issues I wrote about it would be one of the cleanest games I played so far in this jam.
Jonathan Lorenz
20. Oct 2021 · 11:31 UTC
I liked the concept, but I never was able to cook anything that didn't blew up. The art style is good and the overall mood of the game is great. Overall I can't say I had much fun because I didn't really understood how to play. Maybe a tutorial that help you create your first potion could be useful for first timers. Good work overall!