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Risks
It’s a new week, which means a new game! This week, we decided to take risks. The big risk we all took was using Unreal Engine.
Usually, and in classes, we use Unity. So by choosing to use Unreal Engine, we knew that we would be forcing ourselves to relearn the basics. This is a risk we chose to take, and at the end of production, we all acknowledged that it was something we wouldn’t be doing again. As this post goes on you’ll end up seeing why.
First, as it always does, we started with an idea. The idea centered around alchemy. You play as an apprentice to a master alchemist. During his studies, he accidentally turns himself into gold! Now, you must take over the shop, making potions and serving customers by day in order to research and buy ingredients to help your master turn back. This game is a Shop Manager game with 3D platforming elements, since the shop you run is inside a large tower, and you must climb the flights and leap over gaps to reach all the ingredients you need. To help illustrate this, I’ve added game images below.
This shows the front of the shop. Seen in the center of the shop are three cauldrons. Each cauldron produces a different potion (which will be explained later).
This is a view from the top floor of the shop. It’s three stories high, and the upper levels don’t have a solid floor, making it harder to walk around and get the ingredients you want. The colored cubes you see are the potion ingredients, labeled by the text over them. We decided to have five different ingredients for this prototype. The ingredients are: Ash, Silver, Water, Mercury, and Salt.
In this image, I’ve started making a potion. I am currently grabbing Ash. I’m making the Diethyl, which requires Ash, Water, and Silver. 
This is an alternate view of the game (I paused and moved around in the editor). You can see me adding ingredients to the cauldron now. To add ingredients, it’s as simple as putting the ingredient into the top of the cauldron. 
After putting all the potion ingredients into the cauldron, a potion flies out. This potion is then brought to the customer, and the order is completed. 
Also, as you may have guessed, everything in this game is physics based. This makes for some really fun interactions where you can throw ingredients into cauldrons from the top floor, or fling a potion towards a customer.
We have a list of Systems and Mechanics that I worked on with the other designer. You can read it here:
Phillips_Yeash_RulesAndMechanics_Sprint2
We also did some research and made a quick list of potions and how to make them. This was a simple list, and we would most likely convert to a spreadsheet later in development, but this was enough for a one week sprint.
Phillips_Yeash_PotionsList_Sprint2So, as I said in the beginning, we decided to take risks. The major risk was using Unreal. Out programmer has a really hard time learning the visual scripting, and while I tried to help out where I could, we overestimated the amount we could get done. Because of this, we had to cut the customer system from the prototype. At QA, I represented that physically by writing the potion recipe on a white board and asking the players to make me a certain potion.
Another risk was taken by our artist. She tried to imitate a style she was unfamiliar with. While this was more successful than our other major risk, she had to spend more time to get assets to a point where she felt comfortable with them.
Overall, I think that this prototype was a success. We finished the majority of what we wanted to get completed, and created a game which people still enjoyed at QA. This was wildly encouraging. If people liked the game in the state it was in right now, we know we have a great base to build the game off of in the future.
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