Sybil’s Potions

Sybil’s Potions is a role-playing game where you play as a witch called Sybil who lives in a cottage. Sybil needs to collect foragables (flowers, leaves, mushrooms, etc) outside in order to craft her potions. It was inspired by Little Witch in the Woods and Stardew Valley. See if you can craft her potions and enjoy the pixel graphics as you play!

Reflection

Sybil’s Potions is a combined Major Project I worked on in two classes. The game mechanics were created in Engineering Design 2 and the sprites were drawn in Computer Graphics and Design 3. I chose to do this as I loved the idea of the game and wanted to have good-looking graphics without dedicating too much class time to them. This ended up working well and I am proud of the overall completion.

Due to the Inventory and Crafting systems in this game, I learnt a lot about variables and the Draw GUI event in GameMaker. I also learnt how to use Adobe Photoshop which is the software I created the sprites in. I felt a high level of achievement when eventually all the game mechanics worked after over a month of working on them.

I am happy with what I was able to complete although I do think the game feels unfinished. Once the player has crafted both potions available there isn’t really anything else to do. If I was to continue working on the game, I would create more potion recipes and foragables as well as a buy/sell system so that crafting potions gives the player a reward.

There were many trials and errors while making this game. Most of this was to do with the Inventory System as I was watching a YouTube tutorial that was too complicated. I was able to eventually create a working system thanks to a classmate who had created something similar in her game. There were also many minor bugs to do with room changes and sprite blurry-ness which needed fixing by making all room sizes the same. I decided not to include a cat in the game as I ran out of time, and I would have had to create a mechanic where the cat follows the player around.

If I were to start over, I would definitely ask for help with the Inventory System a lot sooner as I wasted a lot of time trying to get something to work that just wasn’t going to. I would also do more user testing as I found the feedback very useful. I would have done testing again after more game mechanics were working as I wasn’t able to get feedback on those. I was in a bit of a rush to finish the game in the last week so I would time manage better next time and get the mechanics finished earlier so that there is less important stuff to finish towards the end.