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Little Potioneer's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Use of Crafting Theme | #1 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Gameplay | #2 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
| Overall | #3 | 2.875 | 2.875 |
| Graphics | #4 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
| Audio | #14 | 1.250 | 1.250 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How long did it take to make?
Around 15 - 20 hours
What assets were made before the jam period?
None, all assets were custom created for the gamejam.
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Comments
I enjoyed this! I'll be just echoing similar points of some of the past comments.
If you plan to work on this in the future, definitely consider making the shop a "left click to buy" instead of drag and drop. Also, I have the memory of a goldfish, so some sort of alchemy book that kept track of discovered combinations and the graying out previously failed combinations would be a great addition.
Good work!
No music?
However it's not bad, but there's no hint on the ingredients that you need to use in order to create a specific potion.
I unlock the mandrake ingredient and the fairy dew, but then there are 6 ingredients and 216 combination of them (6 x 6 x 6). A lot of combinations are just useless (give no potion) and you just cannot try all the combinations. So I tried some of them and then give up.
I think a drag and drop system to buy ingredients makes very difficult to accumulate a huge stok of ingredients even if you have the money ( I had ~500 gold). And this choice make even harder to buy ingredients to try all the 216 combinations. To try all of them you should buy something like 648 ingredients and every time you should click and move your mouse, this is absurd.
There are actually much fewer combinations than it seems (the order you put stuff in doesn't matter, only what you put in). I believe 1 in every 5 combinations should result in something and I was hoping that was common enough for people to stumble into some combinations. Ideally there should've been some system to help you figure out viable combinations I agree.
Finished the game by finding 17/30 potions
Actually, there are 156 combinations with the final 9 items. With 6 items there are ((6 | 3)) = (6 + 3 - 1 | 3) = 8! / 6! = 8 * 7 = 56 combinations. See wikipedia.
good to know, I didn't remember that the order doesn't count. But even with only 56 combination it's not so easy to try every combination. You still have to buy 3*56 ingredients one by one... I'm not complaining about the number itself, but the fact that I honestly gave up because it was to repetitive to try without an hint on the ingredients.
There was a plan for a while to have descriptions for the ingredients to make it more possible to figure out recipes, for instance the darkvision potion contains both rat tail and newt eye (rats can see in the dark) and flight potion will contain dragonfly wings and fairy dew (both dragonflies and fairies can fly). however I didn't have enough time in the end to get that worked out. I also wanted to have a recipe book to show what potions it was possible to find, but that also got scrapped. Being able to buy ingredients in bulk would definitely have made sense to add as a feature.
If you want to improve this game in the future, I think that the descriptions of the ingredients are a good idea :)
Well, ran out of gold trying to make potions at the start of the game. Instant game over. Fun.
The idea is to make the potions you know to earn enough money to experiment. More starting money might have been a good idea though. You can try the recipe of two dragonfly wings and one rat tail and then sell the result.