Archived from the old blog. Original publish date: August 31, 2023

Hey everyone!

Another dev-log for you, late as usual. This is version v0.5.0 and it is probably the largest update I’ve done yet (the release structure for this project has gotten away from me a little).

Highlights

Brewing 

The main event! Brewing is now a mostly full fledged feature. Here’s how it works:

First, you need a liquid for the base of your brew. Water is the only option currently, so we’ll take a barrel of water, and load it into the top slot of the tank. Each barrel holds 10 units of liquid. The tank holds your liquid until you’re ready to brew, and its also where you fill up from after you’re done brewing.

Once we’ve got liquid in the tank, we can move on over to the cauldron. This is the meat and potatoes of brewing. Here you select up to 3 ingredients to brew.The brewing triangle will take the essences from these ingredients and combine them into a potion effect.

After we’ve done a bit of experimenting with our ingredients and have an effect we like, we can select how much we want to brew with the fill gauge on the right. You can brew up to 20 doses at once (2 barrels full), with a full 20-dose brew being the most resource efficient, but most time consuming. Getting down into 1-dose brews is very quick, but uses resources at much higher quantities per dose. 

When we’ve settled on a batch size, we can click start, and the temperature minigame begins. This is largely a placeholder for a more significant minigame that will come later, so we can gloss over this very simple version for now. The current goal is to just hit the space bar when the temperature is at the indicator line. When successful, brewing automatically starts.

Brewing is time based, so certain potions may take a while. I have that time set very short for demonstration.

Now that brewing is complete, we’ve gotta get it out of there. We head back to the tank. Now we use the bottom slot to fill our vessel. Right now I have implemented barrels and vials.

 Barrels hold 10 doses, but the player can’t drink directly from them (its a big wooden barrel after all). Vials hold a single dose, and are stack-able up to 10. The idea here, is that filling vessels takes time and effort. This will naturally make vials more viable (heh) but take more effort from the player to fill. But barrels enable selling in bulk for someone looking to make quick cash or meet a quota. These details will be worked out more later when the bartering system gets worked on.

 Brewery & Hidden Grotto

Now where would brewing be without someplace to actually do it. Here is some art for some new scenes that are available in the game: the Hidden Grotto and the Flask & Barrel Brewery

 

The Hidden Grotto serves as a remote location that the player alone has easy access to. Here they can set up their various hobbies like gardening. This location is also where you will find the Flask & Barrel, the players main base and brewery.

The brewery will have plenty of options to customize it and make it your own. But for now here’s what we’ve got. In here you can see some of the new artwork for the brewing equipment like the Cauldron, the Tank, and some large barrels.

But how do we get here? And what’s up with that one door?

Inventory Management

I realized while working on brewing that my bare-bones inventory management was not cutting it anymore, so a unintended feature of this version is a huge overhaul to make things more user friendly. There are new mouse/keyboard functions, and a large under-the-hood rework of the UI code to make things a lot smoother and easier to expand. We’re now caught up with some standard RPG interaction behavior:

• Left Click: Pick up the stack
• Shift Left Click: Moves a whole stack quickly to the next open slot.
• Right Click: Pick up one item from the stack.
• Shift Right Click: Pick up half of the stack.

I’ve also added an indicator, so you always know when you’re truly hovering over a slot.

You may also notice that items have a sort of “background” color in their slot. These are the item’s rarity, and it comes down to 4 categories

• Common, Green
• Uncommon, Blue
• Rare, Purple
• Legendary, Orange 

The precise colors and levels may change over time, they’re really just a placeholder right now for something bigger later on.

Some things that are harder to see:

• Multi-color text is now supported, allowing me new ways to show off aspects of items.
• Dynamically sized hover boxes now properly encase all the necessary text.
• Large under-the-hood code refactoring to make everything cleaner and more efficient.
• Menu components are independent, and can smoothly move on and off screen automatically

Palette Overhaul

Something that is hard to really show off in a screenshot, is the fact that the palette for the game has been completely overhauled. I’ve spent a good amount of time establishing a consistent color palette, and going back to previous art and forcing it into the new palette.

This has resulted in much faster art going forward. I spent a lot more time than I’m willing to admit before just making colors and trying to get them right. Now I just pick from my limited palette.

I’m sitting at 120 colors right now. I am going to try my best to keep it from growing too much more than this.

Tool Based Crafting Beta

This is a new feature I am still work-shopping. Eventually, I’d like for the player to have a limited amount of crafting stations available to them, but as they play on, they can unlock certain tools for crafting. The idea is that the same station with different tools could bring out different ingredient properties differently. Still has a lot of work to do.

And that’s what I’ve got for now! The next update I’ve got planned has a lot of under the hood work, so I don’t think it will be nearly as visual as this one. During that time, I will also be doing lots of concept art to take a break from the code, so hopefully there is plenty of that to show!

Until next time!

– Nick