Hello Friend

It’s been a hot minute since my last post on this site.

Just before Christmas I started the fourth and final game jam of my first year of university and me and my team had to decide on a brief that was created by the then-current second year students.

The Brief

The briefs that we were supplied with seemed strange. There was a lot of Hades-clones or games that, to-us didn’t sound too coherent.

Therefore, after some deliberation and through exercising some democracy we decided on a brief where the player would need to explore a series of locations, gathering ingredients from plants around the environment, the using those ingredients to brew potions that you would then sell in your store for profit.

We, as a team felt like this brief, while more ambitious, was the most unique out of the selection we were given, and offered us the most freedom in terms of art style, theme, and setting.

Development

We created the game project in Unity, we first started on working on the player movement, inventory, and plant harvesting.

The inventory system was a pain to do, and it was hard to integrate it into anything, such as the brewing system itself. Despite a team member working on it for a few months I, unfortunately had to replace it in hopes to fix any of the major bugs plaguing the project. This new system was easier to integrate with the brewing system and was a little bit more stable.

Jira

This project was also the first time we had any hands-on experience with Jira. It is an evil tool, but a tool that I had to use, and I do actually believe I am getting the swing of it. I used it quite a lot. Adding new tasks, bugs, and epics. This in retrospect, probably wasn’t the best idea, this is because as a developer if you open the Jira to a hundred new tasks, it’s probably going to be a bit demoralizing and overwhelming.

You can play this game!

That’s right. You can play this. Find it below and give it a little go! Tell me how it is and how it goes.
https://phroogy.itch.io/alchemy-express

Aight, I need to sleep. Bonsoir.