Thank you for your feedback! Unfortunately, you'd be correct to say that I didn't have time to fully finish. I had to make quite a few cuts to get it done in time and didn't give the game any playtesting.
It's intended that death comes quickly in the game and that the progress/power ups of a normal metroidvania are less so static abilities and more the players understanding of how different ingredients interact with each other. I'll probably need to do a better job at conveying that though as certain death isn't what I was going for haha
The alchemy system works quite similar to the inventory. I used an array that stored what ingredients had been tossed into the brew stand in combination with boolean variables for the different ingredients. Once the array was full, it would loop through the array and assign a true value to whatever ingredients it found within. Once complete, there was a bunch of 'if (blue && red){ //potionOutput = blueRedPotionPickup}" to see what those ingredients made. Then it was as simple as instantiating the potion pick up.