next »

[Riku]

I've dived full time into working on my own game. I've only made smaller games or been just a part-time contributor before, so this is a huge step for me.

Most recent trailer:




The world of Potions is a dark and mysterious one, filled with cunning creatures from old tales. It is your job, as an aspiring potions master, to battle these monsters with both your wit and your powerful potions to help your friends.

Armed with a recipe book, a broom and your feline familiar, you must scavenge and battle for rare ingredients to craft potions to combat the monsters and curses that besiege your village.

As powerful as your potions are, they are also your greatest weakness. Faced against the overwhelming forces from the enchanted lands that surround you, using your potions recklessly may leave you with an empty flask belt and no way to protect yourself. Only quick thinking and resourcefulness will allow you to dodge around the monsters that merely desire a taste of your flesh to fight the ones which hold the precious ingredients you need to craft potions for battle once again.

Game Description

Potions is an adventure crafting game that emphasizes strategic decision making in when, how and whether to engage with enemies. You play as a young girl, named Luna, who desires to become a potion master while protecting her small town in a world riddled with fable and fairy tale influences. In order to be successful, she must adventure into the dark and mysterious areas surrounding her town to battle monsters and find ingredients to craft potions to help her friends.

Unfortunately for Luna, her only method of fighting is using her potions as weapons, so they act as her ammo for fighting monsters as well as her tools to help her friends and solve the puzzles of the town and surrounding lands. Careless use of her potions slows progress and foils her missions.





Luna (Main Character) Art


Old: http://i.imgur.com/k0HC7lR.jpg


Dev Video Blog

Blog 1:



Blog 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLzOXTILXXI

Blog 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gikcsdo8_oE

Blog 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0bxXPxhX1c

Blog 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPVNEKlqahw

Blog 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv4dyV1Qr1M

Blog 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Avfgb3Yzo

Blog 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpGqT5cZNlw


Progress

Implemented:

• Inventory
• Loot tables
• Basic monster AI
• Basic potions (small explosive attack and self-heal)
• Recipe book
• Crafting known recipes
• Equipped potions customization
• Saving/loading
• Art (replaced all placeholder art)
• Held inventory limits
• Experimental crafting
• Spider AI (for demo level)
• Tutorial
• Obstacles/puzzles
• "Tossing" held inventory items

Next:

• Boss fights
• Switching saves from binary to other file format
• MORE POTIONS!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stumblingcat
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RikuKat
Website: http://www.stumblingcat.com

[Riku]

I made a monster spawning script!

You can put it on any object and then add multiple monster prefabs to it (each with their own "chance" to spawn) and control how many monsters spawn and the speed at which they spawn.

All of this art is temp art, so please be gentle there.

[saluk]

Those are some pretty nice videos Riku! Thanks for sharing your experience. I like the balance between your feelings and progress and the project; and the more technical aspects. At times, some of the technical discussions - for instance, how you set up your inventory - do get a little hairy without more intimate knowledge of how your game is set up. Although that might be because I'm not that familiar with unity.

Good luck on this huge step you have taken. I am still trying to work full time and get stuff done on my games in the evening, and it feels like I'll never get there, so I kind of envy people who really go full on in following their dream.

I like the game idea. I'm curious what kind of puzzles you are envisioning? It seems like balance might be a difficult task, ensuring that players don't just only use the most useful potion all the time, or that players have reasonably easy access to the ingredients they need for the next task.

Looking forward to the next video! Have you ever thought about livestreaming some of your coding sessions?

[Riku]

Thanks!

I have to admit, sometimes I fumble with some of the technical bits because I don't practice what I'm going to say beforehand and I'll forget where I placed some code or exactly how I set something up. I've considered making full tutorials, but there are so many great ones out there that I don't know if they'd provide much value.

The puzzles would be fairly simple, like using an explosive potion to break through a cracked wall or an area cleansing potion to remove flames blocking the way. I haven't had any ideas for really puzzling puzzles yet, I was thinking of going with the Zelda hidden temple / caves route instead of more complex puzzles.

I really haven't considering livestreaming my coding sessions. I guess I just never thought there would be that much interest in it? I feel like a fumble around in my code a lot and I can't really envision it being too interesting, but I might give it a shot if you think that people would be interested.

[Riku]

Real art!

I will be adding particles to make this come "alive" as well, but I was so excited by my real in-game art that I had to share!

[Riku]

Got all of the kinks figured out!

[Riku]

Here's some in-game art that's being worked on!

[PrismaSlice]

I'm one of the artists working on Potions. Here are some of the monster stuff I've been doing recently. Illustrations are all done in Photoshop then rigged/animated in Spriter. Finally I export sprite sheets for use in Unity. I create everything at 2048 then let Unity scale down to final size.

MushDoom animations




Spiders (Rough Idle)

[Riku]

Screenshots with new environment art. It with made with small environment assets and large tiles. To hide the seams, they have overlap and the left always overlaps the right and the bottom always overlaps the top.

Figuring out how to layer the styles and sprites automatically is going to be a fun project. With the sprites I plan to try to use their y coordinate as their layer (by multiplying it and rounding it to an int).

[TheChaoticGood]

I like how your art work is evolving. Keep it up and good luck on going full time.

[Riku]

Thank you!


I'm going to be streaming development live today at http://www.twitch.tv/rikukitty

First, I'll be changing damage from direct modification of a monster/character's stats and switch it to calling a function on them.

Then I'll be implementing some new animations one of my artists just finished and fixing up the code for the corresponding mobs.

And, unless my team has other ideas or goodies for me to play with, I will be starting the implementation of DoTs!

[Riku]

The stream went really, really well, except I didn't know my Twitch channel wasn't set to record it, so that's six hours of development lost to the nether!

The motivation of people watching helped me crank out a ton of work, some that I had put to the side for a long time.

Anyway, today I:

-Implemented web and venom spiders (including Wesley's amazing animations)
-Made potions explode when they collide with walls
-Added an "immune" list to the slow effects on webs so they don't slow spiders
-Created a DoT AoE
-Created a function for handling incoming damage for both monsters and Luna
-Made it so that slows affect the animation speed as well (so monsters take slower steps when they are slowed)
-Implemented an ordering of monster objects set by their y-axis position so depth works properly when they collide

[jamesprimate]

ohh this is coming along quite nicely. admittedly the mockup in the original post made me go "ehh", but amazing how huge a difference a few months makes!

[Riku]

We've been working on a lot of planning recently. Hope to hit the May 15th Indie Megabooth submission deadline as well as the June 1st late submission deadline for Indiecade.

I've been doing a lot more project management and research for crowd funding for the past few weeks. Pages upon pages of notes and a good idea of how to run a successful crowd funding campaign. More importantly, I've been fleshing out how much money it will take to finish the project.

I have focused well on programming the project to be flexible and easy to adjust and add to, but I don't believe I gave enough consideration before on the huge task of design. Certainly, programming and art and audio make a game, but they aren't really anything without design. Code design, story design and art design are a little easier for me to wrap my head around, I can judge audio design but am by no means and expert, but I have found that I can barely even recognize my own ability when it comes to game design. Luckily, design by trial and error seems to be working fairly well, but, after more time thinking about it, I have a better grasp on just how much design is required to make a game like Potions and I have been setting up tools to help me with that. Needless to say, the creation of dozens of potions from even more ingredients is not going to take a lot of time to design and balance!

On the code front I changed how Luna was moving from a Translate to a MovePosition, which fixed an annoying bug that made her shake (and, thus, the camera shake) when she was running into a wall. That then changed how her physics interacts when running into monsters so I had to change their relative masses and drag.

I had heard before that a lot of balancing isn't using what "makes sense" in the physical world, but balancing more towards what "feels good." This exercise proved that to me, as I have ended up with Luna weighing much less than the monsters, even the small ones. I did some trickery with the knockback effects to ensure she wouldn't go flying off the screen when hit by one, though!

I plan to buckle down on bugs for the next few days, while taking breaks to implement the dialog system and experimental crafting system. Then it's to programming my first boss fight!

[justincavenagh]

Wow this looks really cool, great to also see that your putting in as much work into developing as having a plan to actually have your project funded and released

[Riku]

Thanks!

When going through my old notes, I found this list of "Done" items and I thought it might be interesting for people to read what my jotted notes look like.

Done:
PressKit()
Site updates
Post-GDC follow-ups
Monday meetings
Trello
Slack
Explosion force does not apply to environment objects (made them kinematic)
Mushroom animations
New attack calculations (based on trigger areas, not collision)
New aggressive movement behavior (not running to center)
Held item limits
Fix Flip() bug when standing directly above or below monster
Share company twitter
Hide hp bar when not active
Aggro-range vs deaggro-range
Make lob spell as well as straight spell (for spider web)
make single flip code
potions explode when colliding with walls
Function on girl for things to call to damage her (same with mobs?)
check why double death animation when killed mid cast
spiders aren't slow by webs
Venom spiders (DoTs)
slowing slows walking/running animation speed
Turn y axis into order in layer (reverse)

[Crabby]

Huh. Looks interesting! I'm a huge fan of this art, looks very unique.
Those spiders are really big and pretty dang menacing!
The MushDoom is just creepy.

[Riku]

Just finished a dispell potion (I call it the "Magic Floor Cleaner"), set it up so that tiles layer themselves depending on their location in the scene and added in a dialog manager!


This was the core of the code for setting the sorting order properly (tiles overlap their top and right neighbors):

            int xFactor = (int)((children[ii].position.x * -10) - 100);
            int yFactor = (int)children[ii].position.y * -10;
            children[ii].GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>().sortingOrder = xFactor + yFactor;


And here's the dialog working in it's roughest form:



It has a slight cooldown so you won't accidentally double-click past important text and it progresses if you click anywhere on the page, then closes with the last click when it reaches the end. Right now, a script (though very simple) is required for each dialog scene, but I have it set up to easily change that to be able to be read from a file.

[Riku]

Content, content, content, LOGO!

I greatly, greatly expanded the map of the first level, allowing for a gradual introduction to harvestables and monsters.

I added a ton more items and harvestables that don't destruct on harvest and leave a bare version instead (so you don't destroy a whole plant when picking berries). I also got our logo in the game! And a start screen!

The cherry on the top was setting up a script to add in the background layer (all of those thorny tiles outside of the main map area). 



For some reason, this map is deceptively large when you actually play it. It doesn't look like a ton from the top, but it feels HUGE when you're playing.

[Riku]

Title screen with theme music: