Potion Commotion by hulien22
Potion Commotion
Description
🧙 Play as an alchemist-magician captured by goblins and forced to make potions.
📝 Manage your table-space as potion orders, recipes, and ingredients get sent down the chute every 10 seconds.
⚗️ Try to keep up with the orders, and keep an eye out for a way to escape... 👀
How to play
Drag and drop ingredients onto filled potion bottles to add them to the potion.

- You lose lives when an order times out or when you submit the wrong potion with an order
- Potion orders, recipes, ingredients, or tips come from the chute every 10 seconds
- The cloud lets you fill potion bottles with water
- To submit an order, drag the order paper, and the completed potion into the goblin's hands
- Use the cassette player to configure your "chill beats to make potions to" - The goblins are not that evil
- Use the heaters to heat your potions. Potions can be heated 2, 5, or 10 seconds
- The mortars and pestles and be used to grind ingredients
- The ingredients drawer contains all the ingredients you need
- The bottle drawer contains empty potion bottles
- Drag items onto the garbage to remove clutter from your desk
Be sure to read the in-game tips.
~Have fun and embrace the chaos!~
> Play here! <
Tools
Made with Godot v3.5.1, FL Studio, Photoshop, Paint.NET
Screenshots

Updates
- 10/4/2022 - Fixed bug with dropping items into potion using touchpad
- 10/4/2022 - Fixed bug with cloud movement on small screens
- 10/4/2022 - Ported to web
| Link | https://github.com/hulien22/ldjam51 |
| Link | https://hulien22.itch.io/potion-commotion |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/potion-commotion |
Ratings
| Overall | 290th | 3.808⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 370th | 3.615⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 439th | 3.487⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 656th | 3.577⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 189th | 4.205⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 111th | 3.986⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 327th | 3.319⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 264th | 3.784⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 58🗨️ |
I have a few suggestions/requests on specific things to change:
- Make it so potion recipes, at least, can never be rotated more than a few degrees. Having your recipe go spinning upside down because you moved it across the table is both frustrating and unrealistic.
- Either slow down the time between orders (I know, I know, the theme, but this is postjam so it doesn't matter, you could even make the timing customisable in options) or make it so you never get ingredients along with the order, and only use ingredients from your drawers. Currently the clutter mechanic is more frustrating and annoying than fun. I can see this becoming an incredible potion-making game where you juggle things and brew multiple potions in parallel, but you NEED to have a reasonably clear work surface for that to work, and keeping the work surface clear can't be such a significant demand on your time or go hand-in-hand with how close you already are to failing.
- Adding ingredients to the bottle should be streamlined. It took me a little while to figure out that you need to have the ingredient next to the bottle, then drag it onto the bottle... as opposed to simply dragging it onto the bottle from anywhere on the table. Little things that slow you down like that should be minimised.
I would LOVE to play a polished postjam version of this.
Let us know if you make it to the end of the game! :smile:
@killerb You can heat the potions by putting them on the candle heaters (they start off on the left side, but you can move them around if you want). The potions will change colours after periods of time - sometimes it might be a bit tough to see the colour change since we use random colours, but you can use the puffs of smoke to help count the seconds
Great entry. Well done.
How do I submit my order?
Please give my game a try if you have some time!
Error:
"WebGL not available"
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🧪 On the topic of dropping items in the potion bottles, the way the code works is that it checks if the potion bottle is underneath the *mouse pointer* when the item is dropped - we did have plans for having some custom mouse cursors that would have helped to make this clearer, but unfortunately ran out of time..
And here is some (hopefully constructive) feedbacks:
When I started, my first reactions were that upside down notes too hard to understand and items come on the table at a too fast pace!
And after playing a while, I think that perhaps the problem is somewhere else: since the game has a chill vibe, with soothing interactions and visuals, perhaps it's the time pressure that create a dissonance.
But with items being dropped every 10 seconds, if you don't give the player a reason to move on... Perhaps some of these ideas:
- making it easier to make potions
- and instead of dropped items every 10 seconds, having just 1 new order every 10 seconds (and after a while, 2, then 3 orders?), and the order being easy to identify (like displayed in a panel on the top-righthand corner).
- removing the collision of an object with the other ones when it is being dragged (ah, Erukolindo says that too)
Some thoughts:
- Amazing intro, congrats.
- It have some great ideas but it's too much information in too little time.
- I couldn't figure out how to deliver a completed potion
Although I liked the drawings at the start, restarting the game was a bit slow. And I restarted a few times before remembering what the end goal of the game was. I made it to the end eventually.
It was funny to see how the mess on the table got bigger over time, not unlike my desk sometimes. ;) Sometimes it was a bit hard to get an ingredient into the bottle. I think this game would be very nice with a touch screen..
Very neat game, congrats! :heart_eyes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8piqzu1ktE