Beginning

Hello! I'm Potiondev and this is supposed to become a game about brewing potions. I'm a beginner amateur game developer, and this is my first actual attempt at making a game. I've had some game projects in the past, but those have usually been very short form projects with no real goal in mind. Very simple things, basically just making some blocks move on screen, maybe colliding with each other. By trade I'm a web developer so programming is familiar to me, but art, game design, sound effects and even video game specific programming are completely new to me, and thus I consider myself a beginner. I will approach this project as a hobby more than anything, and my progress on it will be slow. I have a day job and responsibilities as a husband and a father, so I have very little free time. I will however aim to make a finished product, some day.

Game about brewing potions

Earlier this summer I was playing Skyrim for the first time in a long time, and I happened to quite like the alchemy minigame. Trying to find good combinations for the ingredients to make as powerful potions as possible, even though very simple, was surprisingly entertaining to me, although I would have preferred it to have a bit more depth.

Later on I was cooking (IRL this time, not in-game). I was trying to balance the bitter taste of some herbs by adding something sweet and an idea of an alchemy system for a video game occurred to me. I started developing this idea in my head, a top down 2D game where you gather, farm and buy ingredients, discover effects in them,  and trade those potions to adventurers who need them, After some time I talked about my idea with my wife. To my immense surprise, my wife, who does not play video games, said that the idea sounds fun and that I should make it. This finally convinced me to actually start this project.

Tools

I've never used an engine before for my old hobby projects, so no engine is at all familiar to me. After some research I chose Godot. It seemed to be the most recommended one for 2D games like this one and it's FOSS, so it will most likely cause the least hassle if I ever want to publish anything. I chose C# over GDScript as a scripting language. I have some experience with C# in the past, and it's a universally used language, so I anticipated that it would be easier to find libraries and support if I ever need it. LINQ is also very nice and I expected to need it for the alchemy system I envisioned and I was not sure whether GDScript has tools like that . Code editing I've been doing in VSCode, which I've been using for work for years now and I have it all setup for my preferences.

 For sprites I've been using Pixelorama which has worked well enough for me. Sound effects I have created with jsfxr for now.

The picture below is what my game currently looks like. It's not great, but if you compare it with what I started with (below that), it's already some progress

Thanks for reading! I hope I will be able to update the blog soonish, I already have a list of topics and experiences I want to cover.

- potiondev