Potionworks is a shop management potion crafting game where players craft potions using their ingredients to complete orders when possible. Potionworks is targeted for Android mobile devices.

Personal Contributions

Inventory System Programming in Potionworks

One of the other larger pieces of work I completed for this game was implementing the inventory system & the managing the item database. I mostly replicated a lot of the logic used from previous games I have created, while improving in areas that underperformed in the other projects. The big changes I had made for this project was using file I/O to load in item data, more robust Item class to hold more info, and better storage of said items to be accessed by other members and myself.

An interesting situation I ran into during the back end of the project was figuring out how to visually display each item, so players knew what state the item was in. We had base art assets we purchased that we could use for default versions of items, but we would need over 130 different images to represent each unique item. My solution I came up for this was to have templates for what each state should look like, then apply masks and filters to get the desired representation. I did this by setting up the default item holder with the correct visuals, then toggling specific visuals based on data saved in the item. While the visuals were not the greatest, the items convey what they need to, and the system is scalable if I want to add more items. Adding more states is possible, but a little trickier.

This system is triggered once you attempt to give the customer their potion. Every potion in the game has a value based on how rare of ingredients were spent to make it and each customer in the game has a reputation value to show how much they like or do not like you. Using these two numbers, I essentially run them through an equation that uses the potion's value to determine what you will receive and using the customer's reputation to determine how fair the offers made will be. This system brings 2 unique dynamics that give the player options over how they receive their award. First off, players can make the decision over whether they want gold or more items. While getting enough gold might be the endgame goal, savvy players could see getting other potions or more ingredients as an investment of sorts, unlocking the potential to earn even more later. Second, reputation with the customer is also now a factor to consider. Since the customer may give a bad offer, the player then needs to decide if they bite the bullet and take a bad offer, increasing rep, or if they deny the transaction, saving their potion but making the customer not like them as much.

From a design perspective, the goal was to try and augment the resource management in a positive way, since this system is a little extraneous. This accessibility and small play sessions something to focus on, trying to give players the ability to jump in to collect their resources, even if they did not have time to play a full day. It also can be a motivator to jump back into the game as well since players will be opening the app to collect resources. I do not want this to be the main way of gaining resources though, so you can only get resources you have found already and the rate that you get resources is very slow. If I had more time to work on this, I would be looking to rebalance the grow times and resources given on collection, just to try and create more interest and variability in the mechanic.

I was also the one who implemented this system and figuring out how I wanted to approach making it was a little challenging. The system pulls the time from the phone and saves the information to a file when the game is closed. When the app is opened again, it compares the expected end time with the current time, and if the current time is after it considers the process done. One way I would love to expand this feature is figuring out how to add push notifications when a resource is done to help players keep track, so they don't have to.