Witches' Brew

by likirus

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.26

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.20

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.34

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.16

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.34

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.42

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.47

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.97

Welcome to Witches' Brew!

Follow the potion recipes and create mystical potions! Unfortunately your Witches Cat has decided to take a nap ontop of your chimney and cut off the gas ventilation so the toxic gases accumulate and may kill you if you cannot complete the potion quickly enough...

Engine

The game has been made in C++/OpenGL/OpenAL using my own engine and libs. Due to their messy state I am not releasing the source code at the moment, which means I can only enter the Jam. However, everything except the final release build has been done in the 48 hour compo time and every graphic/sound effect has been created during that time.

Tools

- Visual Studio
- Photoshop
- Audacity

I am fairly happy with how the game turned out. Obviously there are still a ton of improvements that could be made, but I feel the game is in a playable -though short- and polished state.

Controls

Read the recipe and drag&drop the ingredients into the cauldron. Keep the cauldron temperature in the optimal green range by dragging logs onto the fire. The gases accumulate a lot quicker once the temperature gets out of the range so once the thermometer turns red, make sure to put more logs onto the fire quickly.

Tags: #fantasy, #magic

Genres: puzzle

Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Audacity

Comments16

nate_wec6 Dec 2017, 09:07

Cool little game, though I couldn't figure out how to keep the toxic gases from killing me. Feels like following a cooking recipe which can be fun.

azuredraco6 Dec 2017, 09:08

I liked the game concept, the gases started to accumulate very fast (too much heat?).
I also accidently dropped wrong ingredient and the ingredient started to bounce around. Was kind of expecting cauldron explosion or such :)

Syrapt0r6 Dec 2017, 09:09

Interesting idea. I liked that there were fairly few options so the choices were kept simple, but I think the recipes got too long too quickly. Maybe gradually introducing more items to create a better learning curve would be an improvement. Other than that, good game! :D

michaelsonbritt6 Dec 2017, 09:20

Nice particle and glow effects. I like the idea of a fast-paced puzzle and matching game that incorporates an ingredients system.

Likirusauthor6 Dec 2017, 09:32

Thanks for the nice feedback :)

@nate-wec , @azuredraco : yes, the gases accumulate a lot quicker once the temperature of the cauldron gets out of the green temperature range ( the thermometer turns red when it is out of the range ), I should have made that a little more obvious I guess

MagmaFortress6 Dec 2017, 09:36

Not quite such what I'm doing wrong here. After throwing in the HCl, the temp jumps way up and I have too much toxic gas shortly after.

Samuli6 Dec 2017, 09:39

Difficilty curve was pretty steep, not much room for errors.

Also I couldn't resize the window or make it full screen so text was hard to read on a 4k screen (not a big deal, I applaud you for using your own engine).

Likirusauthor6 Dec 2017, 13:05

@magmafortress : keep an eye on the cauldron temperature and drag logs onto the fire if it gets too low. I added a controls section above to hopefully keep it clearer how the cauldron temperature and the gas accumulation behave

@samuli : my engine isn't completely consistent when resizing, so I chose to focus on the rest of the game, instead of making sure everything scales correctly, but I realize it's hard to read on 4k, something to work on for next ld ;)

jlreymendez7 Dec 2017, 03:06

Very cool that you used your own engine!

Very hard game it doesn't give you enough time already on the second level! You need to make the learning process a bit easier I think.

Congrats on the 48hs entry!

Pedro Miranda7 Dec 2017, 12:30

Cool game! It was a bit hard for to get the grasp of it but nice entry.

ronin7487 Dec 2017, 13:40

Worked great in Wine on Fedora. Nice engine!

ebim7 Dec 2017, 17:43

Nice game but maybe too hard for my taste. Nice job, specially when done by yourself and with your own engine!

totsboy9 Dec 2017, 14:56

Really neat idea! But how do you stop the gas on the longer recipes?

Yomalolo9 Dec 2017, 16:08

Nooo, an installer. Could you make this browser-playable?

hijomo9 Dec 2017, 16:39

The idea is good. I liked how you had 3 little mini games that each had to be juggled to pull off a final recipe.

Archimagus10 Dec 2017, 19:48

Man, that last recipe was a bugger, took me 3 or 4 times to complete it. Thank you for not starting the game over from the beginning on a failure. The graphics were cute. Overall a pretty solid entry.

Other games by @likirus

★3.68

★3.45

★3.46