More involved discovery process

[eˣponentia]

I'm not a huge fan of how the moment you create a potion you know exactly what its effects are and I think there's a cool gameplay opportunity there.

There should be a room that's a lab of sorts, that has a whole bunch of different objects (maybe purchasable or unlockable in some other way) like water glasses, seeds, potted plants, mice, etc etc. And you'd have a few ways to interact with them so that you could test your potions on them. Then you could either have it automatically fill in the correct effect once you figure it out, or you could manually mark it down and have some other way of "confirming" your discovery.

I think this adds more "realism" to the simulation, and it also makes the discovery period a little more fun and involved. I'd love to have a few potions sitting around that I've brewed that I have no idea what they do because I just haven't figured it out yet.

At the moment it's impossible to make a mystery potion and I think that's sad.

[Charm Quark]

I don't think having to test potion effects is necessarily a bad idea, but how would you implement it in a way that works for all potions, that is also easy to implement and wouldn't just double the development time of the game?

You somehow need a way to take an unidentified effect, and distinguish whether or not it is a mana potion, a magical sight potion, poison, explosion or necromancy. Mana and magical sight only take effect if you drink them, but drinking poison will kill you, and drinking explosion/ necromancy can't be good. Testing on an explosion effect would just be straight up dangerous in any case. It would be a long, multi step process, and that sounds like a nightmare to implement.

Honestly, I think adding a whole bunch of extra steps to brewing would probably be a bad idea. A lot of suggestions I see add a lot of complexity to the game, but the satisfaction of the game comes from its simplicity. The thing most people (or at least a lot of people) have the least amount of fun with is making the philosophers stone. Why? Because there are so many steps involved, it begins to feel like a huge grind.

[eˣponentia]

But the complexity of the philosophers stone is a grind because it's nothing new. It's all the same effects you've already found, you just have to use a bunch of resources to get different combinations than you normally need. It's not that fun to figure out the most efficient way to do it because you need to make each step so rarely (when more salts and effects are added you'll need to do it more and so the efficiency will be more wanted/needed but for now you can just make do with crap paths).

By the time you're going for the philosophers stone you pretty much know what all the ingredients do and when they're good to use, you've figured out good paths for strong versions of every potion (except maybe necro). Getting the philosophers stone is about going through the motions.

The lab wouldn't be all that hard to implement. It would be time consuming as more effects are added, but not necessarily hard. You take a potion, figure out what would be needed to confirm its effect, and then figure out from all the objects that the lab would contain, what would happen to them if you used the potion on them. Do some animations for anything that would happen, done. Some potions would affect everything (light, frost, fire etc) and would be more time consuming as each object would need an animation for it, others would affect very niche or even hyper specific things (necro, magical vision, fast growth etc), and so would only need one animation.

Testing the potions would be a multi step process but implementing the potion testing wouldn't be. An object either reacts to the potion or it doesn't. When testing poison for instance, you start by pouring a little bit in a bowl, nothing happens. Then on a stone, nothing happens. On a plant, either the plant dies or nothing happens depending on what type of poison the devs decide it is. Magical vision would eventually need you to consume the potion yourself after going through all the steps you know up to that point including feeding it to a mouse, and only noticing that it does something when consumed because the mouse acts weird but you don't know what, only that the mouse is unharmed.

The idea is to not drink every potion you brew straight away, but to go for the safer tests first. Plus adding fun consequences for unsafe testing could be fun.

I do however agree in some sense that making what is currently in the game more complex than it is isn't necessary, however things definitely need to get more complex later on in the game to keep the game fresh.

It's just weird to me that I'm a novice alchemist discovering potion effects (I don't even know how to brew a healing potion until I stumble upon it) but I just magically know what it'll do and sell it to my customers without even testing it at all.

[Charm Quark]

I mean, this does increase the workload of adding potion effects by quite a lot. Every time you add an effect, you need to decide what tests you would need to perform in order to identify it. Sometimes that might be quite complex. Moreover, if you want to add in an effect that doesn't really fit those tests, you now need to add in a new one specifically for that potion, e.g, necromancy would likely need a specific test to see how it reacts to corpse.

Not to mention it makes finding specific potions for villagers more frustrating. In order to find a new effect, you already need to explore the map, probably using more ingredients than necessary as you don't know the layout yet. When you finally get to a potion effect, it can be slightly annoying to find out that it's not the one you were looking for. Now imagine if you also have to do this long testing procedure and find out you got the wrong effect anyway.

A lot of times, things in games might just happen for the sake of convenience, even if it isn't realistic. It's not quite realistic how in first person shooters you can recover from being shot several times and keep fighting like you're in perfect health. It might not be realistic, but it's way more fun that basically being crippled for the rest of the level. Even if it's more realistic to have to experiment on potions to find out what they do, is it actually more fun? Maybe, but I could also see it getting old pretty quickly.

I don't mind an increase in complexity, but I would prefer it if they do it through the primary gameplay loop rather than adding an entirely new gameplay loop. When they add more maps to the game, maybe some of them will have actual portals, or currents which carry the potion along regardless of if you are heating it or not(like a river). You could add effects that require you to heat from two locations instead of just one. Maybe ingredients that change their path once you have added an effect to the current potion. There is still a lot of unexplored depth to the current gameplay, which I would prefer rather than splitting the focus to something entirely new.

Overall, I don't hate the idea, but I'm quite skeptical of whether or not it would work. It seems really hard to implement for niche potion effects, which limits the new ideas you can add to the game, and I also don't think it will necessarily be more fun for everyone. Maybe there's a way that would be relatively streamlined, but I can't see it.

[eˣponentia]

This is also a potion making game where the potions do literally nothing except get sold. Just another thing that's conspicuously missing that would be solved by adding experimentation.

Currently the only thing that differentiates one potion from another is the colour and how customers react. The plants could be adding colour only for all I know.

If you expect "exactly what we have but more" you're going to be disappointed when they start adding shop upgrades and management, garden planting and management and more. I think potion testing is a logical addition to the process and one of the extremely few I can think of that aren't already in the game. If the devs are going for the most basic game they can under the premise then ignore this completely, but apart from what I've seen they have planned my suggestion is the most logical extra system. I would enjoy it, hence suggesting it.

[Ptolemy]

Originally posted by eˣponentia:

This is also a potion making game where the potions do literally nothing except get sold.

And create and refine reagents.

[eˣponentia]

Originally posted by Ptolemy:

Originally posted by eˣponentia:

This is also a potion making game where the potions do literally nothing except get sold.

And create and refine reagents.

True, but the point of my argument was more along the lines of "the effects don't actually do anything other than tick a box that says 'this potions contains x levels of y'"

Selling and reagent making are basically the same, except selling allows for some room for interpretation or improvement while reagent making is specific.

I can't see what a potion does except by just trusting the text that says "potion of fast growth".

And it is just still so immersion breaking that I'm a complete novice throwing random plants into a cauldron but the moment that a puff of smoke comes out the top I know exactly what I've just created.

[Ptolemy]

Originally posted by eˣponentia:

True, but the point of my argument was more along the lines of "the effects don't actually do anything other than tick a box that says 'this potions contains x levels of y'"

Selling and reagent making are basically the same, except selling allows for some room for interpretation or improvement while reagent making is specific.

You're moving the goal posts a bit by going from "potions do literally nothing but get sold" to "potions don't do anything relating to their prescribed effects", but regardless, being sold and being used to make reagents are not the same just because neither application involves the effect of the potion being visually demonstrated in game.

I didn't find knowing what a potion does once its effect was located on the map to be immersion breaking, personally, because I assumed that the process of figuring out the effect was part of the abstraction that was going on with the entire map mechanic. Not to say that it is necessarily a bad idea to add some kind of additional testing mechanic, but to be honest my immediate thought when reading this suggestion was that so long as effect locations are not random, this seems like it would be a fair bit of development to create another layer of challenge which is fairly easily sidestepped, and is in any case no challenge on any repeat playthrough.

[eˣponentia]

Originally posted by Ptolemy:

Not to say that it is necessarily a bad idea to add some kind of additional testing mechanic, but to be honest my immediate thought when reading this suggestion was that so long as effect locations are not random, this seems like it would be a fair bit of development to create another layer of challenge which is fairly easily sidestepped, and is in any case no challenge on any repeat playthrough.

Yep, completely, I never mentioned it because it's already a massive flaw with replayability that I expect to be addressed in any sort of new game+ mode or randomizer. Because already, replaying the game makes map visibility perks next to useless, only convenient for making a perfectly efficient recipe on the first attempt at making a given effect.

I fully expect some sort of randomized map at some point before this game ceases development, and that's where as system like this would really shine. I'm not saying I've perfectly nailed exactly how it should work, or even close, that's why I've titled this post "a more involved discovery process" and not "a lab for testing potions". The discovery and exploration are the most compelling aspects (currently, garden and shop management will maybe be more fun) of the game for me, as clicking brew from recipe and placing a potion on a scale is in my eyes just a means to an end and has no fun involved whatsoever. Figuring out efficient recipes and the best ways to make complex potions is nearly as, but not quite as fun as the initial discovery and exploration.