Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to our game project, Potion Madness, for the course Group Projects at DAE Howest. In this first devlog we will introduce our game and talk about our initial thoughts and challenges ahead of us. Our team will update these devlogs every week, telling you about our progress, failures, wins and offer you a look behind the scenes of what’s currently happening with our game. 

Our group is made up of 4 people, two coders Artuur and Xander, two artists Shyuen and Tomáš.

The game we are making will be a PvP game set in a witch's house! Play as adorable animals trying to gather magical ingredients scattered around the witch’s house. 

Watch out for ingredients falling from the sky, the garden, and even from the crafting tables themselves! It's a potion-brewing free-for-all as you compete to create fireball potion, ice potion, blow potion and more. Will you choose to drink these magical mixtures for personal gain or hurl them at your friends for explosive area-of-effect chaos?

With only 60 seconds left on the clock, the witch casts unpredictable spells that transform the map and affect all players, adding an extra layer of pandemonium to the already frenzied competition.

Get ready for a spellbinding experience where strategy, speed, and survival instincts collide. Can you outwit your friends in this whimsical battle of witches and potions? Let the potion-fueled madness begin!

How are the potions going to work?

1. Fireball potion - will create a fireball and cause a fire when thrown on the other player
2. Ice potion - will freeze the player movement for a certain time, and make the tiles slippery for player to walk on
3. Blow potion - will blow the player away and stun for a certain time (basically a bomb without damage)
4. Heal potion, inverted controls potion, blindness potion… and more!
   
   

Potion recipes or not?

There are two main iterations we are still testing and will test further.

• Craft potions based on recipes
• You craft random potions

Both have the same main principle when you collect a set amount of ingredients you craft a potion. The first one will give you a potion based on set recipes. The latter will just give you a random potion.

The mechanic that is in this week's prototype is the second one with random potions. The main problem we are trying to avoid is making the crafting tedious and boring which might be more at risk when using recipes.

To lessen this risk we are thinking of some cool mechanics that could be added, see question below.

How will the crafting of the potions work?

This is something we really had to think about as the game is a local multiplayer without split screen. So you can’t have a crafting menu or something else that takes up all of your screen estate. It needs to be something simple yet clear and not take up too much time. Because otherwise you'll get attacked by your fellow players!

The main idea right now is a quick time event. Something simple like a bar with an arrow that's going left to right and you need to press at the right time to craft your potion.

On the other hand a potion could just spawn in your cauldron if you collected and brought the right ingredients for that potion to your cauldron.

Another idea we had was using some kind of combo system. So you'll need to mash a combo on your controller to get your desired potion.

What is our game going to look like?

For the art style, we aim for a bright, colourful colour scheme, simple shapes and cute humanoid animals. We started on a rough version of our Art-bible and gathered some reference pictures that we liked.

The game will be seen from a top-down angle, like the game "Overcooked", where players will play on a map based on a witch’s house.

How does the render pipeline look

With our art style we aim for a toon-like stylized look. Our first decision was choosing the right renderer. Between deferred and forward we chose deferred since we want to access all our scene textures in the G-buffer and create additional shaders from them before the lightning pass. These shaders will be a Cel Shader and an Outline shader to give our game a toon like look that we aim for. 

For our modelling pipeline we aim for a modular approach that will help us quickly iterate over our environment. All the models themself will be low-poly with either flat colours for basic models or hand drawn textures for more unique ones.

What are we going to do next week?

• We will playtest between the crafting from random or based on recipes
• Add the quick time event to the crafting mechanics
• Add common danger mechanic (Witch in the centre of the map)

Thank you for reading and see you next week!