Articles VGTimes Interview with the Author of Potion Craft

VGTimes Interview with the Author of Potion Craft

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Potion Craft entered early access on September 21, 2021. What is so good about the project created by St. Petersburg developers? The author of Potion Craft, Mikhail Chuprakov, will tell you about it.

What is Potion Craft?

Potion Craft is an alchemist simulator. The gamer will play as a wizard who can mix herbs and create miraculous potions. Every day, customers come into his shop, and each of them has a lot of problems.

Someone needs a healing potion to improve their health. Someone asks for a stone skin potion to survive a fight with bandits. And someone demands to brew a fire potion to burn down the garden of a more successful peasant. Who to serve and who to drive out of the shop — it's up to you.

To brew potions, you need to collect herbs from the garden with your own hands, throw the ingredients into the vat, grind them and stir the mixture with a ladle. Potion Craft has good physics, which adds realism to the process.

Creating potions is implemented in the format of a mini-game. The flask is sent to the center of a large map, which has many effects scattered around. Once at one point, you will create a potion of rapid growth — it will help the farmer avoid hungry times. Get to another place and get a potion of invisibility — with it you can avoid trouble.

The trick is that you have to travel around the map with the help of herbs, mushrooms and other alchemical things. Each item paves a specific route. Windflower moves the flask up. Waterflower — to the right. Witch's mushroom — diagonally to the northeast. There are many such ingredients in Potion Craft, and each has its own function.

In addition to cooking, the hero will have to do other activities. Communicate with merchants, argue with buyers for the best price, upgrade skills and assemble an alchemical machine. With the help of the latter, you can create incredible things like the mystical philosopher's stone.

All these mechanics create interesting gameplay. Some people will find the activities repetitive, but, in general, they are interesting to do. This set was enough to explode to the top of the Steam charts and earn 93% positive reviews.

How did the game top the sales charts?

VGTimes: Hello! Can you tell the readers about yourself?

Mikhail Chuprakov: Hello! My name is Mikhail Chuprakov. I am the founder of niceplay games and the lead developer of the game Potion Craft.

Author of Potion Craft Mikhail Chuprakov

VGTimes: Potion Craft topped the global Steam sales chart an hour after its release. Was this a surprise for you?

Mikhail Chuprakov: If you ask me, I expected this development. I think the publisher did too. We had a good wishlist base, plus a large community on Discord. The question was how long we would hold on to first place, and we held on for quite a long time.

VGTimes: The audience from wishlists and Discord are gamers who enjoyed the demo during Steam festivals?

Mikhail Chuprakov: The biggest peak in recruiting future players was during the Steam festival in February. It was the first time we showed the game to such a wide audience. Before that, we had been developing Potion Craft for a long time, but we hadn't really shown it to anyone. So we had modest feedback.

We held a test before the festival. Steam just had a playtest function. That's when we saw that many people were interested in the project. At that time, I also wrote an announcement post on Reddit, and it took off well. There were about 50 thousand likes: most likely, this also gave a good boost.

After the test, we finished the game so that the main problems were fixed by the festival and some mechanics interesting to players appeared. We barely managed to finish the demo by the festival, posted it and, in my opinion, already on the second day climbed to the first place in trends.

After the festival, we did not close the demo. We decided that it would be useful to develop the community, even if people would play for free. In parallel, we held challenges once a week in Discord. There we gave a task in the spirit of «brew a potion with necromancy and levitation effects.»

Then we started trying creative competitions. We have very flexible customization: you can customize the appearance of the potion bottle, the name and description. The task was to write a description in verse or brew a potion that would tell about your life's work. Accordingly, thanks to the festival and working with the audience, people learned about Potion Craft.

VGTimes: Before Potion Craft, you released a couple of other games. How did the niceplay games studio come about?

Mikhail Chuprakov: There are five people in our team now, but it all started with me doing solo development. In short: I have always been interested in creating games, and already in my third year I became a game designer.

At the time, I was working for hire, but I was also making my own trial games. At some point, I started working on Wizard Swipe. I combined my main job and personal project for six months, and then went freelance.

When I started running out of money, I released the game. It turned out that Wizard Swipe took off. I supported it for a long time and created updates, and then I took on a new project, Sushi Ride. This game turned out to be much less successful.

That's when the idea for Potion Craft came to me. I drew a concept and decided to make a prototype. After many months of procrastination and other things, I polished the prototype to a presentable state and made a video about Potion Craft.

When I posted the video on social networks and forums, I received a lot of comments, likes and feedback. But I showed only one mechanic, and people liked it.

After some time, I thought about working with a publisher. I had been following tinyBuild for a long time and how they work with partners. In addition, I personally knew many people from there. One day, I showed Potion Craft to the founder of the publishing house Alex Nichiporchik and continued working. After a while, he himself invited me to collaborate.

Initially, I planned to make the game alone, but the guys said that it is better to work in a team. tinyBuild provided funding for me to assemble a team and make the project better and faster. At first, I didn't want to do it, but then I realized it was a good idea. It was a new and unusual experience for me.

About alchemy

VGTimes: During the development process, did you consult with alchemists or herbalists?

Mikhail Chuprakov: I am not professionally familiar with alchemy. I haven't read huge manuals on the topic, but I did some research — some superficial, some relatively deep.

When we introduced things like the Philosopher's Stone into the game, we tried to study more sources. This is a pseudoscience, and different cultures have different opinions about it.

And knowledge about brewing potions and other processes was drawn from games, pop culture, movies and fantasy. Our focus is not on realism. We have a fantasy world, and it is quite flexible.

If we talk about games with realism and the Middle Ages like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, then the authors had to justify the fact that potions really work. Although in real life, potions are not as effective as in games. In our case, everything is simpler. We can, like in Harry Potter, come up with some conditions and limit ourselves to more or less logical justifications.

About gameplay, balance and repetition

VGTimes: There is an opinion in the comments that the game seems to be addictive, but at some point it becomes too repetitive. What do you think about this?

Mikhail Chuprakov: I partly agree, but you need to understand that Potion Craft is first and foremost a sandbox. Usually in a sandbox you have to come up with goals yourself and somehow achieve them. True, in Potion Craft there is still a limited list of tasks that you can do.

You can endlessly invent various potion recipes. Look for optimal routes. Select ingredients. Alas, in the late stage of the game, all that remains is to complete challenges from Discord, but we will most likely have in-game activities for the endgame. The player will be able to endlessly receive content that will captivate him.

One of the goals in the game now is to make the Philosopher's Stone. It takes a long time to make it: first, you need to learn how to brew potions, then earn money, then repair the alchemy machine to the first level, then craft Nigredo — the first level of the Philosopher's Stone. And so on.

All this takes a lot of time, because, firstly, you need fairly complex potions. Secondly, you need money to brew them. For a gamer who plays for the first time, creating a Philosopher's Stone is a serious challenge.

Not all people even reach the first level of the Philosopher's Stone, because the game may get boring a little earlier. Maybe they like brewing potions, but there is not enough variety. And we will also need to work on this variety.

The game is currently in early access, and we are going to continue to fill it with gradual content updates. For now, the gameplay is quite monotonous, even though there are several mechanics to dilute the main activities.

The main mechanics are moving around the map, trading, management. There is also an advanced mechanic of the alchemy machine. Plus a couple of small mechanics of activities like customization. Most likely, people want something else.

VGTimes: Gamers often encounter two problems. They lack sheets on which to write down recipes. Plus, buying ingredients from merchants and creating some potions seems unprofitable due to the low selling price. Was this balance created intentionally or should we expect changes?

Mikhail Chuprakov: It looks like you didn't buy additional pages for the recipe book. And you most likely didn't buy them because they are expensive. This is exactly the thing we want to work on.

We will refine the balance so that it becomes ideal, but we need to do it gradually. We had two demos before the release, where we collected feedback. For example, at the release, we already made the price of special ingredients much cheaper.

About the pages: at first they are really very expensive — we realized that. There are plans to make it so that the player can remember more recipes already at the start, because there really aren't enough of them. This annoys some people.

We will come up with a flexible system, when the first pages will be cheaper, or we will simply give more recipes at the beginning. We don't want those who can't buy upgrades to suffer. It is better if this is an incentive for those who have spare money.

And with the balance of ingredients and effects, everything is complicated. If you don't go too deep, then yes, this was done deliberately. Everything is calculated so that the player will start making quality potions from free ingredients quite early.

The expectation is that you will quickly reach self-sufficiency of potions, and at the same time you will improve the characteristics of trade and bargaining. Well, and it is advisable to bargain for a better price. Gradually, the hero will increase popularity, which will also increase the price of potions.

The problem is that we do not explain very well how to make third-level potions. Often, people just brew weak potions, and they do not pay for themselves. Weak potions are sold, roughly speaking, for 40% of the price. But third-level potions are made from slightly more expensive ingredients, but bring much more profit.

First of all, we should work on how to convey to the player how to properly run a business. Maybe at the beginning, push the player a little in the right direction and simplify some things.

But all this needs to be done carefully. The balance is made in such a way that you reach normal profit early, and then it starts to grow strongly. Because upgrading trade and bargaining can increase profit eight times.

About upcoming updates

VGTimes: Will there be an opportunity to upgrade the garden so that more plants grow there. Or, perhaps, improve the mortar and other tools in the lab?

Mikhail Chuprakov: There will most likely be a separate big update for the garden. There are no additional mechanics in the garden yet — you just go there every day and collect herbs.

It is planned that gamers will be able to manage the garden. Perhaps we will add mechanics that the audience often asks for. I am not promising anything, but gamers would like to have the ability to use potions on their garden. For example, a potion of rapid growth or a fertility potion.

People also say that it would be cool to water the garden and choose what you plant. This is one of the main innovations that we want to introduce. But all this needs to be tested — the main thing is that the updates do not break the balance.

Maybe we will also add mini-games for collecting ingredients, which will further dilute the main gameplay and make the process more diverse.

About the laboratory. Yes, there will definitely be some improvements there. We assume that it will be something like various shelves where you can put potions, various signs or decorative elements. At the same time, all this will affect buyers. If you hang a skull in the hall, necromancers will start coming to you more often.

In general, we had several mechanics that we wanted to introduce into the game, but then we realized that it would get worse. For example, in our ideas there were salts that turn the direction indicator. We implemented the idea, but it turned out that it made the game ten times more difficult. People's brains would just explode.

About the Witcher in Potion Craft and Early Access

VGTimes: Interesting characters sometimes come to the alchemist's shop. For example, the one who is easily recognizable as a witcher. He returned from the wild hunt and asks to replenish his stock of potions. Aren't you afraid that one of the copyright holders won't like this?

Mikhail Chuprakov: I don't understand what Witcher you're talking about — we have a regular monster hunter. In general, I don't think that harmless references will upset anyone. We have a lot of them, but we try not to overdo it with references.

There are games that are teeming with references and consist almost entirely of them. We try to add them carefully.

VGTimes: How long does Potion Craft plan to spend in early access?

Mikhail Chuprakov: We are not talking about deadlines yet, because this is a dangerous business. Often, plans change a lot in the process, and many things take longer than planned. Some mechanics are postponed altogether in favor of others.

I'll put it this way: our goal is not to release as soon as possible, but to make the game good enough to be released. Quality is most important. We don't want the rush and race to fill the game with content to spoil the overall level of execution.

VGTimes: There is a feeling that Potion Craft would fit perfectly into the mobile format. Are there any plans for that?

Mikhail Chuprakov: Many players say that it would be cool to release on Android and iOS. In general, we agree that Potion Craft can be used on mobile. But for now, we have other platforms in our plans.

First of all, this is a PC version, because that's what it was originally designed for. The controls and interface are tailored for PC. We are also considering other platforms, but we are looking more towards consoles.

Mobile platforms are also being considered, but most likely, with slightly lower priority. There is a peculiarity there: you can't just port a game — it's a lot of work.

At a minimum, you need to rework the controls and adapt the interface. If you launch Potion Craft on a mobile phone now, the interface will seem very small and you won't be able to click on the small buttons. There are plenty of difficulties that we may encounter if we take on the port.

Potion Craft can be treated in different ways. Some people admire the pleasant mechanics, while others are outraged by the repetitiveness. The main thing is that the authors are full of enthusiasm, see the problems and diligently improve the project day after day.

The author of Potion Craft, Mikhail Chuprakov, is in love with his craft and is burning with the idea of ​​making a great game that will please hundreds of thousands of gamers. This is the main reason why the game took off. After talking with Mikhail, it is simply impossible not to believe in the alchemist simulator. We wish niceplay games success and will closely follow their work.

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VGTimes has been operating since 2011 and during this time has visited dozens of exhibitions and festivals, where our journalists have collected many exclusive materials. For example, in 2019 we got to a closed screening of Cyberpunk 2077 at gamescom, in 2017 we prepared a photo report from WG Fest, in 2020 we were at the largest gaming event in Central Asia CAGS, and also visited IgroMir several times, where we saw Hideo Kojima and other famous developers.

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