Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator News

Whether you’re still waiting to join the ranks of alchemists or looking for a nice gift for your friends and loved ones – here’s the golden opportunity at your gate! Save 20% on Potion Craft until December 1st, 10am PST, during the Steam Autumn Sale and start your journey down the Alchemist’s Path today!



We’d also love to use this opportunity to remind everyone that you still have time to nominate Potion Craft for ‘Outstanding Visual Style’ for the Steam Awards 2021. Your help in getting us to this year’s shortlist is invaluable and we are eternally grateful for it!



Last but not least, we’d like to let you know that we’re currently busy working on the Potion Craft update. We’ll be sharing some more information with you shortly in our next devlog, so keep your eyes peeled on the announcements!

The Annual Steam Awards are on the horizon and we call upon your help to get us to the short list of nominees this year! Use the form above to cast your vote for Potion Craft in Outstanding Visual Style nomination or any other nomination that you feel is right. Your support really means a lot to us!

Hello alchemists!

We hope you're enjoying your potion brewing experience so far. It's been a while since we last talked about the development of Potion Craft, and today we wanted to show you some of the WIP assets and animations for one of the most important tools in your shop, the Ladle.

[h2]How it started[/h2]
Potion base pouring from the ladle might be not the most dramatic animation in the game, but it is still important. Each drop matters when you try to make a tier 3 potion, that is why we needed to create clear, responsive animation.



But let’s rewind a bit and return to the moment when we designed the potion base mechanic. As we have already mentioned in one of our previous devlogs, the first piece of equipment for it was a jar, not a ladle. And here is the first test stream animation ever made for Potion Craft:



One might say that it’s more likely honey than water, and they would be right! As honey might become a potion base in future, it was essential to find the right visual for water.





That’s better! Interacting with the jar and implementing it proved to be too difficult and inconvenient, but we still could use these practices in the next iteration where we came up with the static ladle as you know it. Now we had to find the minimum and maximum stream thickness as well as to draw the starting and finishing frames of the animation.



We decided to make 8 states of stream thickness, with 3 contour frames per state. Starting animation is 14 frames and the ending is 16 frames, which makes the total number of contour frames alone 54.



Now we only needed to animate the fill which might be colored in potion base color, put it all together – and it’s done!



By the way, the animation speed depends on the ladle angle and it also accelerates rapidly if you pull the ladle to the original position fast. It is made to avoid cases as such:



[h2]Stay tuned[/h2]
Thank you for reading and, as alchemists say, pour it till you brew it! Please, don’t hesitate to follow our Steam Page and make sure to join our Discord so you don't miss other upcoming devlogs!

Hey, Alchemists! We have just rolled out a small update to address a few critical bugs and add one of the most requested features: saving in files.

[h2]Patch notes:[/h2]

• Totally fixed an issue that prevented players from saving their game.
  
• Saves are now saved to files instead of Windows Registry.
  
• Fixed a rare bug that caused the game to launch incorrectly if you played the Playtest or Demo version before the first launch of the Early Access version.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Green Experience Books to spawn more often after restarting the game. Note: the bug will be fixed after the first night, so you may still see too many Experience Books on the first load of an old save.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused a small part of the Alchemy Map to be non-interactive.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to save the same recipe many times in a row.
  
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the Recipe Book button collider to become much larger than it should be (which disabled the ability to press other buttons next to it).
  
• Fixed a bug that caused scales to freeze in weird positions after saving and loading the game.
  

[h2]Developer comments:[/h2]

[h3]Game Save issue[/h3]
Many players encountered an issue that prevented players from saving their game after some actions. Thanks to your bug reports and help with logs, videos and save data, we were finally able to find the cause of that issue.. The problem was with the limit of Windows Registry key size on some OS / PC. That’s why we decided to save files a little earlier than we planned, so players can continue playing without fear of losing their progress.

[h3]Saving in files instead of Windows Registry[/h3]
Saving in files was one of the most requested features since the game’s release, and now it’s finally here! After the first launch of the game, all of your saves will be automatically transferred to files. You can find them in this directory:

%appdata%\..\LocalLow\niceplay games\Potion Craft\Saves

or

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\LocalLow\niceplay games\Potion Craft\Saves

[h3]Thank you to everyone who reported bugs, helped with logs, videos and save data. Please keep on sharing your feedback with us![/h3]

Hey, Alchemists! We have just rolled out a small hotfix to address a few critical bugs.

[h2]Patch notes:[/h2]

• Fixed bug that caused different random issues during the game (for example Tutorial not working correctly for new players).
  
• Fixed bug that caused creating very long recipes if you use crystals in your potion.
  
• Fixed bug that caused disabling ability to Save the game.
  

If you still have these issues, please check your version of the game first (it should be 0.4.4). You can see version of the game in the down left corner of the main menu. To get update faster you can restart Steam. If you still have these issues in 0.4.4, feel free to write in #bug-reports in our Discord https://discord.gg/PotionCraft.

[h3]Thank you to everyone who flagged it to our team. Please keep on reporting bugs and sharing your feedback with us.[/h3]