Build Download

Here are links to pages that have the downloadable and playable build.

Here's my official entry page on the GGJ2025 website (Windows):

https://globalgamejam.org/games/2025/cauldron-potion-shop-5

And here's the linked Itch.io page (Windows + Mac):

dkoitka.itch.io

Brew potions for customers

Jam Info

This game was made as an entry to Global Game Jam 2025 (GGJ 2025)!

It spanned 48 hours, from 5pm Friday to 5pm Sunday (24th - 26th Jan, 2025).

I worked with a friend and former colleague, Daniel Koitka, making us a team of 2!

The theme this year was "Bubble". We chose to interpret this as cauldron bubble!

Overview

As a 2-person project, we made this game over 48 hours as part of GGJ2025. I was responsible for:

• UI/UX Design

• Art + Animation

• Game Design + Writing (both shared with other team member)

• Minor Programming

The tools I used were:

• Unity

• Affinity Designer

Game Features

The game features 2 major systems.

1. First: The player has to figure out which potion customers want by reading their short stories and deducting which potion is most appropriate from the player's list of potions in the recipe book.

2. Second: The player has to figure out which 3 ingredients make the potion. Each potion's ingredients are cached in the recipe book when you successfully make the potion. If 2 out of 3 ingredients would make a potion, those 2 are revealed in the recipe book, as an extra help/hint for the player.

This loop is driven by a 3-day schedule, with 4 customers arriving each day. At the end of each day, the player will see the results of their potions, with a short story response and a check or cross depending if the potion was a correct fit.

The goal is to get 12/12 potions correct to help the customers. They may also want to figure out all 8 potion recipes, which is tracked at the end as well!

Skills Developed

Since I got the chance to do mostly art and design work on this project, it was an excellent exercise in User Experience! Only having 48 hours meant I had to come up effective ways of communicating to the player what was important to succeed.

Ultimately, the desired UX resulted in a few things:

• The recipe book was non-negotiable

  • Without a list of the possible potions, players would have no idea what kinds of potions they could use to answer the customer's troubles and the game would feel shallow and boring, because the player is not directly incentivised to try new recipes and gets stuck doing the same reliable one or two they may know.

• The recipe book needed notifications

  • On it's own, the recipe book is hidden behind a button. Without something prompting the player to look, there's not much reason for them to open it. I decided we needed a "Recipes updated" notification to prompt player's to open their recipe book and see which potions had new ingredients found. After watching several players, the notification was super successful!

• The ingredients needed labels

  • If we had more time, I would have added pages to the recipe book describing the ingredients so players had a better chance at discovering the potion recipes via contextual hints from short descriptions. However, the names on hovering help a lot as art is too subjective to let players falsely identify items - especially for those generic like "Devil's Horn", that realistically just look likes a horn until the player see's it's from a devil via the displayed name.

Here are all 100% of the game art files that I made in Affinity Designer:

As for game design, there was also a few important things we gathered:

• The recipes still weren't super clear

  • We found players struggled figuring out the recipes as they required an inferred level of thinking and not everyone thinks the same way - this much is obvious. With more time, potions would have a dedicated short paragraph describing their aromas, tastes, etc. to give contextual clues about the ingredients required. This way players could still deduce the potions from the ingredients but they have the choice of reading further if they were unsure about what ingredients to use.

• They only have 1 attempt at each potion they hand over to the customer.

  • This was a difficult choice, but we decided to take this route as the potion recipe discovery mechanic would be less meaningful if the player had infinite attempts. The high chance to fail resulted in a bigger feeling of success when getting potions right. It also added to the replay ability as the recipe book kept it's progress between playthroughs.