Dansk
Svenska
Norsk
Suomi
Deutsch
Italiano
Español
Português
Français
Nederlands
中文
Indonesia
Polski
日本語
한국어
Čeština
Ελληνικά
Türkçe
Tiếng Việt
عربي
Follow us
HQ
Videos
Potion Craft
Distilling Excellence - Interview about Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator at DevGAMM
We talk to the founder and CEO of Niceplay Games, creators of Potion Craft, about the future updates coming to the game, the balance of the experience and their commitment to a differentiating art design.
Audio transcription
"Hi friends, we're here in Lisbon for the DevGAMM 2024 and I'm here joined by Mikhail who had a panel in the morning about Potion Craft and I know a couple of editors at Gamereactor, Rebeca and Alberto, were completely hooked to your game and your panel was called Making Obsession for Detail a Feature of Your Game. So how did you come up with this? How do you think about, you know, being very picky and very, you know, focused on details, like to make that a highlight of your game? Yeah, as a gamer myself I really enjoy such small details and features in other games, so I wanted to make something with, well, perfectionally done and one of the things that I wanted to make work is the controls. This was something I wanted to make perfect and I think that without the attention to detail, as in my talk, it wouldn't work. So that's one of the things that were important for the success of the game as I see it."
"Potioncraft was released almost two years ago, if I'm correct, in January 23?
No, the first release was in 2021. It was in early access and then it was released in full release 1.0 in 2022, in the end of the 2022 and we are continuing the development. We are currently working on the update 2.0 which will release really soon and we've made a lot of changes. We've made so much for the gardening system, full talents rework and a lot of other stuff."
"For those who don't know about Potioncraft, tell them a little bit more about those systems. You have some store management systems, you have your garden, you have a pretty peculiar way of dealing with, you know, you have to do some trial and error, some experimentation to get your potions right. Yeah, so basically Potioncraft is an alchemist simulator where you have to run your own shop with the potions. So one of the main things that you have to think which potion customers need, for example, their buttocks hurt or maybe they want to fire something up and you need to think which potion will fit that and you need to find that on the map, on the alchemical map and try to brew that potion and there is a system that allows you as a player to create different recipes for the potions and there is no one right potion. There are a lot of different ways to make the same potion. For example, you can use two fire bells or one fire bell and one life leaf and get different results or you get the same result with three fire bells or two fire bells and one wind bloom etc. And this flexibility helps players to express their creativity and they are willing to optimize the recipe. I was about to ask about that. I mean, would you say that this flexibility and the way that you can experiment with ingredients is what makes Potioncraft so addictive? Is what gets players hooked? I guess this is one of the things, yes, and as well for me because I like playing Potioncraft and when we are testing a new big version I'm just going and playing and playing and it's really fun when you're playing such a game because, yeah, I always wanted a game where you have this, where you can do the potion as you want it with different ways. So, yeah, I think this is one of the things that draw attention to it and keep players in the game for a long time because they want to optimize, they want to create something different, they want to use less ingredients or they just want to make something different. Like to optimize the ingredients they have or whatever. I've heard that it's very easy to understand but then difficult to master because it has a steep difficulty curve. Is that right? Is that something that you're tweaking with a new version or that you've heard this feedback from other players or is just that my colleagues are just too bad and they have to get good? I'm not sure which particular feedback are you talking about but we listen to players' feedback and we had a few real problems with the balance in the game and we fixed it in the upcoming updates. It will be fixed and we consider all important things that players say because, well, there are things that are made on purpose and there are some things that are made just well, they are done this way and there may be some, I don't know, errors in balance and we tweak that and we try to make it right for everyone. And one of the things that we are trying to make in the new version is you can now select the difficulty of the game because before that you had only one difficulty and we tried to balance it right for everyone and we had three types of players, like regular players that are fine with everything, players that feel that they don't have enough ingredients and they can't win the economy of the game and there are players that feel it's not hard for us enough so that's why we have now four difficulties. Classic one, Explorer, which is easier, and Grandmaster, which is harder, much harder, and there is a hardcore version called Suffering, which is really hard. Like real alchemy. Yeah, like you buy stuff for 1,000 and sell for 5 gold, so it's really hardcore but it's really fun if you are into that kind of stuff. And of course being this like an alchemy simulator you're dealing with the Philosopher's Stone, so I don't know if that's a spoiler alert, I mean this is all about alchemy. It's not a spoiler because when you start the game you can see the recipe, the last recipe, which is obviously a Philosopher's Stone. Okay, so how did you approach this? You know, for it to be implemented into the lore of the game and into the systems of the game, how did you think about this as, of course, as a cornerstone to an alchemy story? Well, at first it was the game about potions, but when we were researching and developing, we thought that we need more deep matter."
"Yeah, and well, it was pretty obvious that, okay, it's a game about alchemy, so yeah, Philosopher's Stone, okay, why not? And we created the alchemy machine and actually at first we thought that alchemy machine would be for creating some special mega potions, like curing the plague or like something really cool, something really strong, and it would be the main quest of the game, but it turned out that we came up with the Philosopher's Stone and actually Philosopher's Salt, which is the last one, which you create from the Philosopher's Stone and which can help you with crafting some potions, and yeah, so that wasn't in the ideas in the beginning, but it was, well, it's one of the main concepts of the alchemy of the, yeah, so it was kind of a logical, logical decision."
"Choice, of course. And what can you tell me about the art style? It of course fits the game, it looks beautiful, I think that's another reason for players to try it out for the first time, so how do you approach it? Who's the main artist? I don't know if you're into art as well? Yeah, the first version of the game was made by me, I was a solo developer at that time, but when we assembled the team we found an artist, his name is Eugene, so he is our art lead at the moment, and we have three artists, one of them actually also helps with the sound design and will make a lot of new sounds for the upcoming update. So yeah, we, I also think that art of the game, the visuals are very important for the success of Potion Craft, and one of the things that draw attention of players is the art style, and it takes a lot of time to polish the visuals, and I am also in the decisions of how everything will look, and I still have some saying in how it should look for the final art, for the final sprites, but most of the things are done of course by our art team, which are doing a great job."
"Alright, so Potion Craft is available on PC only for now? No, PotionCraft is available on PC and all consoles, all main consoles. So these new versions that you are planning are also coming to consoles, right? At the moment we are working on the PC update, because we'll need some time to make the versions for the consoles, but it will be available at some point, but there are some complications with the consoles, because we were always working on the PC version first, so it was available first on Steam, and then we added some other platforms. And it's been published by TinyBuild, and what else can we expect from you guys? A nice play in the future, after Potion Craft. What are you crafting next?
So yeah, TinyBuild is a publisher for Potion Craft, we as NicePlay Games, our team, are currently working on Potion Craft and other DLCs and updates for Potion Craft, which are planned. We have a lot of ideas and a lot of works for the upcoming other updates, and so we have a lot of plans for Potion Craft. As a team, we also plan to grow. We are actually nine at the moment, but we started, as I said, I was alone, but then I assembled a team and we worked as four, but now we are nine and we continue to grow, and we are planning to maintain several projects, so we want to continue development of Potion Craft and try some new projects. I can't say more yet, but we have a lot of ideas and there are a lot of interesting. Thank you so much for your time, Mikhail."
"I'm looking forward to playing Potion Craft myself. I didn't play yet, but I think I'm gonna get hooked, same as my colleagues, so thank you so much, enjoy the show. Thank you, too."
Interviews
More
Videos
More
Movie Trailers
More
Trailers
More
Events
More