Potion Seller by CameronPenner
The Potion seller NPC is often overlooked by your average adventurer, but he has a heart too! Experience life behind the counter as you craft loads of different recipes in our charming little entry :)
You can play either at your own pace in Chill Mode, or immerse yourself in a busy town of busy people in Timed mode!
The tutorial is in game. Mouse over the pages on your desk and they'll explain how it works.
Controls: - Mouse & LMB - pick things up - Escape - will restart the game so don't press it unless you really want to
We strongly recommend you try Chill Mode first (ring the bell on the left) to learn the game! Then, if you're feeling brave, try Timed mode!
Cheats: - Cheat codes! - Full recipe map that we used during development
We had so much fun making this and are really proud of it!
Enjoy, and thank you for playing!




P.S. The Vile of Nightmares is not misspelled. It is a vile creation.
P.P.S: So, uh... I might have gone and made a crappy meme theme song for the game. If you're interested, come back and https://youtu.be/VNN-LPqVmPQ If you're streaming, please god don't play it haha.
| Windows | https://cameronpenner.itch.io/potion-seller |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/potion-seller |
Ratings
| Overall | 15th | 4.288⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 15th | 4.197⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 81th | 3.894⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 641th | 3.439⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 44th | 4.455⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 16th | 4.242⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 44th | 4⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 55th | 4.047⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
Only complain would be that poisonous thingy is trickier than other to grab.
Minor nitpicks ,sometimes gold gets stuck under the bowls of new ingredients and the UI is a bit clunky when you play for the first time.
@nicso Thank you! Yes, fitting so many ingredients around the table had some drawbacks, I think putting the root in front of the cube might have helped :P thank you!
@adam-pandos Haha thank you! I had so much fun voicing him, bleh bleh bleh!
@headless Thank you very much for the praise! Yes, that coin bug really bothers me too. Didn't realise it was such a regular occurrence until late in development when we started having more valuable items.
@tomko Thank you :) super happy you enjoyed it!
@maoap Thank you! Yeah haha perhaps more ways to combine things than just mixing two together would have helped but we're very happy with what we have! Thanks again!
It is really fun to play, here is my a-bit-messed-up-at-the-start attempt:
https://youtu.be/dkmekQ-5qbA
Thanks!
@devio Thank you so much! We appreciate that, and definitely will!
@bismark That's very kind of you to say, thank you :)
@filgreen3 Thanks! We think so, an NPC who has a life too!
Thanks @somuch for the feedback! We agree with that, definitely. It needs polish, and when the coins get stuck behind the ingredients it's really annoying. However, take consolation that any coins that fall off the table are counted :)
@devio thank you very much! we have all sorts of ideas for where to take this next, mobile and VR would work pretty well we thing. (We've already done mobile builds and it's great)
@bismark thank you very much for the kind words! <3
@filgreen3 XD Thanks!
Thank you @somuch for your feedback (I can't imagine how often you must get that) Glad to hear you played till the end! I have ideas for how to do collisions so that it feels a bit more natural. As far as coins go. the ones that fall off the table are actually automatically added to your money, but the ones that are stuck are just stuck DX I agree it really bugged me too, but we didn't have time to solve that one.
Thanks everyone who played! I'll try to get through everyone who commented and try your games too! <3
Should see if you can make a quick VR port of the game would love to try it out using my mixed reality. Also being able to thrown basically everything in the room was awesome so keep that up!
@nam-nguyen That's very kind of you to say! Thank you very much, we are super proud of it.
Now to your swell-polished entry.
Me and my younger sister laughed our ass off of the voice acting of the heroes passing by the potion shop. We actually had the most fun hearing all the voices and discovering all different characters than the potion making itself. The recording quality is excellent and it must have been quite funny recording all these voices. I also think your entry is innovative since it puts you in this position of an NPC, trying to meet all the demands these bypassing heroes have. I think the game achieves this pov really well. Finally I can say that the Minecraft-like style was really pleasing and fitting to the mood the game projected. Well done, you can be really proud of what you achieved in these 3 days and hope to catch you again in your stream. :smile:
@kapiteinkoekwous Thanks for the feedback! It was really cool to watch the stream and see someone reacting to it. That's my favorite. One thing I picked up from the stream is that he was expecting new recipes to be added to the end of the book which definitely would have made more sense. The book was originally a stretch goal that we ended up making it to. To implement it we made a direct link to an internal list of recipes that we knew the user could make. We never sorted these or added them in any order since as a hack we pretty much generate that whole list based off of every item in the game and what's already existed every frame. it's not pretty but it got the job done! :P
@frittatenbank thanks so much for trying out our game! We're both surprised at how much of an impact the characters made! We both though the game was really good and as a treat we just made a whole bunch of characters, and they turned out to be a huge highlight to us and everyone that plays the game! I find it's pretty rare for a LD entry to have actual characters that speak to you, and though it's simple I think we captured that feeling in a charming way :) I really like the chaos of trying to quickly craft something while a customer is looking at you like "Fulfill my needs! I must go to battle!" XD
Thanks @zeriver! We've done a couple entries in a row that we used blender for and it really slowed us down, going the voxel route sped things up SO much, so we're really pleased even just with that alone. We've definitely mentioned outlines as well and I completely agree. Right now tooltips are almost serving that purpose, but it's not the same as explicitly saying "this is the hitbox where you can grab things". I mentioned in a comment higher up that I'd like to add some kind of projection/shadow below the object so you can see where you're dropping it. I had thought about some kind of glow when you're mousing over a second ingredient so you know that the 2 are going to try and craft something. These bits of UI polish can really clarify things that we left unclear this time around!
I didn't really get how it hit the theme, as I never even came close to running out of space. Sometimes it was a bit hard to grab the right item (poison root), and after a while, many coins would get stuck at the front of your stand. The most serious issue though is that the book got pretty buggy at times. It seems that the way it was updating was perhaps a little strange? When there were new recipes and I was trying to navigate it, it often wouldn't cycle in the way you would expect. This was frustrating, but not game breaking necessarily.
Overall, this was a fantastic entry! The voice acting and visuals were very well done, though a little variety in the dialog for each character would have been nice. The game felt a bit slow, but it was rather relaxing. I found myself playing it far more than most jam games. Good job! =)
The voxel style, although classic, is neat and the sounds are good. Controls are simple and effective.
I can easily picture myself playing at this game when I have a five or ten minute break.
I don't know if that's intended but sometimes gold coins get stuck behind my little ingredient bowls and I can't collect them. It made me rage quite a few times :rage:
I'm not sure I have really more to say aside that it's probably in my top 5 games from this Ludum Dare.
Kudos.
There are other, smaller things I liked about this, like the running total at the bottom of how many recipes you've discovered, or the ability to fling the title graphics and tutorial pages around. Annoyed at a customer's complex order? Fling a Knife at their head. It's okay, it won't hurt them.
A couple of people have already mentioned that coins will sometimes get stuck between or behind the bowls. In Chill Mode I can eventually fish them out, but I imagine in Timed Mode they're as good as gone. More often, though, I found coins would slip off the edge nearest to me, and then they really were irretrievable. So the coin physics perhaps need a little work.
All in all, this is a very fun, very well-polished game. Good job!
@f1krazy Coins that fall off the table automatically get added to the money pot! We weren't very clear about it though. In the post jam version it's much easier to grab coins from behind the pots as well. But that one is not for rating. Thank you for your detailed feedback!
Thanks again to everyone who has played the game! We love reading all your feedback, and this jam has been so much fun! You're all the best!