Along with planting plants in the garden, a more engaging talent system is one of the most popular requests from players. The way talents work now was always seen as a temporary solution. So, we're excited to announce that in the upcoming major update, alongside Garden 2.0, we're introducing a completely revamped Talent Tree. Today, we want to share how it will look and function, and take you on the long and winding journey we took to arrive at the final version!
All talents will now be divided into 3 main branches:
- Gardening and Herbalism – everything related to planting, growing, and tending to plants in the garden;
- Alchemy – talents that make the potion-making process more efficient;
- Trading – various talents for selling, buying, haggling, and interacting with visitors.
As a result, we now have a Tree with 56 talents. Some talents require only one talent point, while others can be upgraded multiple times, ranging from 2 to 20 levels. The more points spent on a talent, the larger its icon on the Tree is.
In case alchemy has become second nature to you and you've mastered all available talents, we decided to add an infinite talent to remind you that improvement is an endless process. But if other talents have a fixed number of divisions on the progress bar, how can we represent an infinite number? We tried various approaches and eventually settled on №5 with gradually narrowing divisions, symbolising infinity.
We always aim for clear GUIs, so all the necessary talent information can be found in tooltips, and a small yet helpful animation will prompt you when talent points run out.
Saves from the current game version will be supported after the update, so you won't lose your progress – the already-learned talents will simply transfer to the new tree. However, like any true science, alchemy is about experiments, so you can reset talents and redistribute points at any time (for a reasonable fee, of course).
And now, like true scientists, let's explore earlier versions of the Talent Tree, and try to understand the problems we addressed in the process and why the final version looks the way it does.
The earliest version seems quite close to the final one at first glance: radial arrangement of talents, sequential connections between them, and progress bars. At this stage, we weren't sure if talents would always be purchased for one point, so we considered the option of requiring 2, 3, 5, or even 10 talent points to level up a talent. In this version, pale rings around talent icons indicated how many points were needed to purchase a talent: 1 ring - 1 point, 2 rings - 2 points, and so on. If a talent costs 4 or more points, the rings are transformed into ornaments with embedded Roman numerals like V or X. However, this solution was not clear to the user, the current state of each talent was difficult to read, and the decorations around talents were confusing and added unnecessary noise.
We aimed to make the information more readable: we added clear numerical indications for talent prices, checkmarks for learned talents, and temporarily abandoned progress bars. At this stage, we also considered individual requirements to unlock each talent. For example, to unlock Very Hard Haggling talent, you'd need to successfully haggle 10 times on hard difficulty. We displayed this information on bars beneath the talents. Additionally, we tried representing the Talent Tree like a real tree.
Branches growing from the center in various directions looked odd, so we opted for a more realistic tree shape with a thick trunk dividing into three main branches, each with smaller sub-branches. The three branches are differentiated by their leaf designs: golden autumn leaves for trading, green summer leaves for gardening, and purple spring leaves for alchemy.
Readability of branches and connections between talents was not good enough at this point. We decided to simplify the tree design and we also introduced different color coding to talent icons on different branches instead of coloring the branches themselves.
Readability still left something to be desired, and we decided to simplify the tree design even further, making it cleaner and more abstract. Additionally, we continued our search for color solutions for different states of talents.
While it improved, the tree still drew too much attention. We simplified it even more, turning it into more abstract stems. You can also notice that the design is gradually returning to the radial arrangement of talents.
After the entire process of simplifying the tree design, we eventually abandoned it completely and returned to refining more abstract concepts. The triangle appeared to be a good option for representing the three different branches. Additionally, we introduced locks that prevent access to higher-level talents until the lower-level ones are learned to a certain point.
The triangle looked too geometric for the Potion Craft style, so we transformed it into a circle. We also introduced progress bars and removed the left panel, moving the information from it to tooltips. So, after spiraling up through the evolution process, we returned to an approach resembling the very first one, but at a whole new level – much more user-friendly and visually clear.
Thank you for joining us on this journey through the development process of such a significant design element in Potion Craft. We hope you found it interesting! Stay tuned and follow our Steam Page. Also, make sure to join our Discord so you don't miss other upcoming devlogs!
