Play Perilous Potions on HTML5 and PC!

I wanted to take some time to show off the art process of my entry Perilous Potions. I decided I wanted there to be more of a focus on art this jam where I do my best to add clean graphics and animations in the timeframe.

Making the character and background

First, I jumped into chat with a couple friends and discussed what I was even going to make. The unstable potion concept was literally my first thought, but I wanted to consider other options.

I did lot's of bad sketches with my friends in aggie.io to come up with ideas I still rather like the cryptid pokemon snap game idea, but I'll save that for another time.

In all honesty - the potion game won out mostly because I'm currently working on a full title with this character design in mind, so this felt like potential to flesh out that world or even be a mini-game in the full game.

Once I felt pretty determined on the potion-mixing concept I started sketching out visuals while my friends and I discussed mechanics.

Once I felt confident in the look I wanted, I jumped straight into Adobe Illustrator that night and created the entire character design and the room she'll spend the game in.

I was still very uncertain on a lot of things at this point. What would the UI look like. What were the exact mechanics? Lot's of stuff to figure out.

GUI Design

I started mapping out my UI but I really wanted to avoid covering up all the nice background detailing I had done. I jumped into Invision's freehand tool to play with some ideas on what the UI could look like.

Eventually I settled with a bar at the bottom of the screen to show the user's inventory of potion items.

I realized this meant I had a lot of assets to make, and I honestly probably overdid it. But I had fun making little flowers and herbs nonetheless

I wanted the GUI to feel as much as the user was picking up ingredients from a table in front of them as I could, while still registering as an interactable menu instead of fading into the background. So far in my early testing - players pretty quickly pick up that you can drag and drop these icons without a tutorial telling them so. It helps to mimic other UI that we use in our day-to-day to help shortcut the controls in the players mind.

What I would fix

Honestly my biggest hiccup is how tied up this games mechanics became to color. This would make it very difficult for color-blind players. I did my best to make up for this by always including a color in the item's description and providing a basic color-mixing instruction, but there is way more I can do here to make this more accessible.

Thank you for reading! If you want to see me make these graphics in real time, you can watch the VOD of my twitch stream here!.

My next blog post will be all about the game's animation! Stay tuned,

Deprecat