Potions and Polycules

I had to check what's almost 400MB in this game (usually Godot games are sub-150MB). If you would remove the unused Craftpix and Noraneko assets, the size would improve drastically.

Otherwise... like 8+ hours in I feel like I had way too much fun playing this (besides some unwinnable situations). It would be nice to have more control over upgrades, like a limited reroll, and not being stuck with the last 3 potions on the shelf.

OK, I've played this game waaaay too much (repeatedly) in the last 90 days. My high score on the downloadable version is 77. Online it's 35.

Early game, I've found a lot of utility to rerolling potions in the first 2-3 witches before you've gotten a build together. Just skip all the lvl 1's and rush getting enough allure built up to smash through. For upgrades, it's best to focus on getting the accel potions up to at least lvl 3 (where 2 potions can run a pot) as soon as possible.

There's a little sequence break you can do when you hit the first Drain witch--if you've got strong/frequent enough Expansion elixirs, you can force a backfire ASAP and max out your first slotted potion--then if you rush a victory right after, you can dupe that maxed potion and trivialize the next few levels. That sequence break requires a lot of setup and is finicky.

Anyways here's my breakdown of potion values:

Allure: crucial in early game, weak in lategame. Gives a max of 16/slot.
Glamour: weak. Even a level 6 glamour gives only 6+5+4+3+2+1=21 total allure. Counting the cost of the accels needed to fulfill it, gives 1.3 allure per cast at level 5.
Carnal: painfully weak in early game, busted in lategame. The x3 scaling makes it quickly the most effective single potion, as long as you've got a quick acceleration build. Weak against drain builds.
Charm: requires a dedicated build to make it work. Can be ridiculously overpowered.
Acceleration: Basically worthless below 3. Sweet spot is 4. Crucial throughout game

Expansion: Excellent for forcing backfires. Can cause gamebreaks if you cram too many into your pot, especially when combined with mesmerize. Countered with Compression potion

Mesmerizing: Weak in early game, strong in mid- to late-game. Firing off a couple mesmer 5's can screw up the opponent's pot enough to allow you some freedom to play around.
Bulging: Excellent for causing enduring backfires, especially at higher levels.

Virile: Weird. It pairs well with Compression potion and it's strong against backfires, since it sends the eggplants to the opponent's side.
Sticky: Junk. Easily countered with acceleration potions. At high enough strengths, Sticky ends up creating background potion in the opponent's cauldron, which can be exploited by Rose slime

Corruption: Not particularly useful on its own, but a hard counter to mesmerizing and bulging
Miracle: Overpowered in early game, actively detrimental in late game.
Catalyst: I've never gotten this one to work, but some enemies have good cat builds, so it's clearly effective. I assume it's useful against Ice Slime enemies.
Compression: Quietly powerful. Weak counter against bulging and mesmerizing, strong counter against expansion and growth. Works best at higher levels, which makes this potion a mid- to late-game potion.
Growth: weak. It requires pairing with one of the retained item types (spirals/eggplants) because the growth gets canceled by a brew, unlike Expansion. It might make a decent addition to an end-game build.
Prophesy: Backfire counter. Weak on its own. Can dilute an opponent's inventory with weak Allure potions if you purposefully backfire yourself.
Cowbell: (still) deeply broken, especially with multiple. Simultaneously denies the opponent a chance to advance their build and fills their cauldron with milk. The only counter to cowbell is a hard-and-fast backfire strategy that gets the CB out of your opponent's pot before it can trigger.  

Viscous: Could pair well with Rose slime. Not sure it's worth it.

My high score build was:

3x lvl 5 accel

3x lvl 5 carnal

3x lvl 5 mesmerize

2x lvl 5 expansion

4x lvl 1 corruption

2x lvl 5 compression

6x cowbell

The goal is to quickly hit the enemy with cowbells and mesmerize to whiff their build, then buildup some strong carnals to exhaust the increasingly unrealistic bars. I kept lowlevel corruptions and compressions to counteract any negatives that I get hit with. The build died against an enemy who quickly dropped some expands that caused me to backfire the cowbells and mesmerizes, and got stuck in a backfire loop on the spirals.

I don't know what the counter to the spiral witch is, I thought that if I made the brew go over the top the spirals would fall out, but they didn't, so any spirals she creates are really permanent, and you are immediately running against the clock and need to add a lot of alure to your bews only to barely have a positive net alure at the end. And there is basically no other way to beat her, other than of course making her bew go over the top, but it's actually quite hard to do that, I have never managed it.

Does or will this have sex scenes?

Seems to be majorly unstable. I’ve only gotten it to run once. Every other time, the window either doesn’t appear at all, I get stuck on a solid grey screen with sound, it never goes past the Godot logo, or it crashes on the godot logo.

EDIT: So, I watched this in Process Monitor, and when it fails to load, it’s constantly opening “Potions and Polycules.pck”, reading 512 bytes at offset 202,237,062, 4,096 bytes at 384,490,080, 202,236,720, and 384,493,728, and closing it, followed by failed attempts to open \scripts\particles\bubble_particle.gdc.import, over and over again.

At one point, it also wrote a lot to the log file, which led to me check it, and I found it full of this error:

ERROR: U_FILE_ACCESS_ERROR
   at: _spoof_check (modules/text_server_adv/text_server_adv.cpp:7144)

EDIT2: Ran it from the console with –verbose, and yeah, when it hangs, it’s constantly searching for that bubble_particle file.

Realistically, this means it probably shouldn’t have run that one time at all, so IDK.

EDIT3: Here’s the full log from that verbose run. https://0.0g.gg/?710cae9b593b66db#3AdRgwaWBqtoA6AB5op7eLvBCoATtaysa7K5zPDDii6f

Super addicted to what little I can manage to play. Even if it takes me 30mins to get a handful in the polycule, I can't stop going back to try again! Sadly 70% of my runs end thanks to a crash. 

I particularly enjoyed the 'send to opponent' type effects. I'm a little iffy on the slime ones as they merge very easily and they don't tend to have any effect at the 6* potency since...they're supposed to take up cauldron space not sit in the infinite liquid state! Would recommend that they 'revert' to solid on cast, so that they go back into the cauldron instead of disappearing. At least for the ones that are meant to be thrown at the opponent. Would be a great way to make use of the opponent's liquid mechanic if you filled it up and the moment they cast they're hit with a wall of slime! Maybe a slime that cleans the opponent's slime on infusion but deals allure based on their slime potency at cast.
 

edit:Wow this ended up as a wall of text and a half! TLDR; Lots of troubleshooting to find out my pc is officially potato and to fix that would require gambling on bsod, and that's just to fix whatever the debugger wants not what the game demands.
 
I can only guess that my gpu is barely strong enough to play the game but only marginally and any performance humps means a crash. So essentially, I can only ask for better optimization if I want to actually play.

I've found the honey block and sprials to be particularly heavy on my pc. There's also the milk transformation, but that depends on the sprite being effected for some reason. Some sprites really don't like the milk, like instant crash even on the first step of milkers. On that note some sprites improve my performance quite a bit so sometimes I reroll just for my witch to be one of them. Weirdly they can tank the effects well enough that would slow or even crash other ones.

Could you please add a save run button. It would be really nice to be able to resume your run

hey, i really lijke the game could you add FMG?

growth potion should make the character taller 

Any chance to get it playable on mobile?

How the hell are you supposed to counter hypnosis?

Cool game, surprisingly deep and fun. I have never gotten past round 3 though, the opponents decks feel very ball-busting compared to starting with the expansion potion. Agree with other commenters that customizing the starting loadout and appearance would be very fun. And also the mesmerizing potion is broken (mechanically, very easy to lead to guaranteed backfires even though "it can't backfire").

this looks fun but won’t load on mobile