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You play as an apprentice to a master alchemist. Running around the shop, cleaning up messes and gathering ingredients, you try to learn as much as you can. One day, when you come into work, you find that the master alchemist has turned himself into gold! It’s now up to you to manage the shop and keep up appearances while you find a way to turn the alchemist back!
To put it into standard terms, Potion Seller is a first person, shop management game with platforming elements. The player’s main goal is to serve customers potions. After the shop day has ended, the player then gets to use their earned money to buy ingredients, both to restock the shop and experiment with. The final goal of the game is to discover the master alchemist’s recipe that turned him into gold and reverse it.
After our third week finalized, we were told to choose a game that we wanted to continue production on. We were all in agreement that we didn’t want to do Hotshot, so that left Change or Danger and Potion Seller. We saw Change Or Danger as a safe bat, something that we could do pretty easily. Potion Seller was the risky option. It had some very large systems that needed to still be made, and biggest of all, it was using Unreal, something that we hadn’t been taught much of. Weighing the two, we decided to go with Potion Seller. After all, we all wanted to get more experience in Unreal, and this seemed like the perfect environment to make it happen.
After another week and a half of work, we got:
- Textures for the level
- A whole new level based on player feedback
- An improved potion making system
- Customers who have random orders
- And a timer to see how long the customers wait for their order
Once the 15th rolled around, we had to present our game to the whole school. This was nerve wracking. The presentation wasn’t just to show off our work, it was a test. These presentations would be the last thing that my peers saw before we (my class section) voted on which games would go forward and which would get cut. Out of the four games in my class section, also called the studio, we were going down to two. Going into the presentation, I felt like one of the other games would definitely go through. This meant that there was one spot left.
While I really wanted my game to go through, I understood that this was less about the teams and the people, but more about the overall showing. We want to show off the best Champlain has to offer, and if that means cutting my own game to let another go through, I would gladly do it.
Our presentation is linked below if you want to look through it. Note that the first slide is a video, the trailer listed at the top of the page. If the PDF isn’t loading nicely, take the link to the Google Slides page here!
Potion Seller Presentation
So, unfortunately, our game didn’t go through. It was an hour and a half discussion between Potion Seller and Snowball Showdown, which is a networked VR game about having a crazy snowball fight. Ultimately, our professor had to step in and made a decision to stop the stalemate. It was all in good standing, both games had valid pros and cons, and the entire studio was split in half.
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