Potions and Polycules - Jams and Gems Update
Ok, after a long wait, I would like to announce the tentative release of the brand new Potions and Polycules update!
Right now the new update is download only. I might see in the future if I can squeeze the filesize down a little more to fit within the webplayer, but in the meantime I didn't want to make you guys wait any more than you already have. I've been working on this on and off for a long time to so I'm very excited to finally share it with you all. There's a lot to cover, so I'll get right into it.
And, as with my previous update, be sure to check out the Potions and Polycules Discord if you haven't already
General Changes
- Increased the initial brewing time of concoctions to 10. This was primarily to give me smaller units to work with when balancing effects and existing ingredients have for the most part been rebalanced to maintain their current effectiveness.
- Persistent and Semi-persistent ingredients now have a 1 in 2 chance to be removed when a potion backfires. Super-persistent ingredients have a 1 in 4 chance to be removed. (more on them later)
- Temporary ingredients (such as Bovine Elixirs) are now automatically rerolled at the end of the round.
- Overhauled the colour palette shader to allow for more detailed colour palettes going forward.
New Features
- Added an ingredient encyclopedia.
- Added a basic volume control to the options menu.
- Added keyword tooltips.
- Added the ability to choose 1 of 3 randomised loadouts to start each run with.
- Removed the "Upgrade" reward as I felt it was too easy in the long term to upgrade your ingredient bag to a full suite of max level ingredients - totally negating the physics puzzle aspect of the game.
- Added 4 new rewards:
- Iterate - Adds an upgraded copy of the chosen ingredient to your bag. More powerful than a Upgrade under the right circumstances, but leaves behind the original lower level ingredient in your bag.
- Consolidate - Upgrades the chosen ingredient and downgrades all other held ingredients.
- Persistence - Modifies the chosen ingredient to become Persistent and Single-Use
- Remove - Self explanatory
- Added the ability to spend gold to reroll the ingredients and rewards available at the end of each round
- You gain between 2 and 3 gold each round. Gold isn't just a number - it's a new ingredient! and it makes use of that aforementioned "Super-persistent" keyword, meaning it remains in your concoction, not just between casts, but between rounds too.
- Added a bunch of new ingredients, including 2 new subtypes:
- Syringes - Which inject the first ingredient they come into contact with - with varying effects.
- Gems - Ingredients with powerful effects that do not combine with each other, instead needing to combine with gold.
- Added 2 new transformations
Balance Changes
- Accelerant Elixir - Now reduces your brewing time by 2 at level 1. Effectiveness increase by +1 per upgrade as before.
- Catalyst Elixir - Now casts a number of the nearest ingredients equal to it's potency when combine. Should hopefully make it a lot more consistent to use.
- Prophesy Elixir - No longer adds the Allure Potions to your bag, instead adding them directly to your concoction when cast. This combined with their new Persistence makes them a lot more powerful than before.
- Glamour Elixir - Now grants 3 allure per level when cast.
- Sticky Elixir - Now adds slime to the opponent's concoction when infused, as opposed to when they are cast, but you still have good reason to cast them, as they now transform into Allure Elixirs after you do so.
- Cowbell - Now converts 2 random ingredients into Bovine Elixirs when infused. A fairly minor drawback, but should hopefully make you think twice before adding 9 of them to your bag.
- Hypnotic Spirals - Can now combine, doubling in effectiveness whenever they do.
And ofcourse a bunch of miscellaneous bug fixes and other changes I'm sure have slipped my mind.
If you're still reading up to this point, let me say a quick thank you for all of your support for this project - hope you enjoy the new update!
Comments
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I've had a bit of time to play a few sessions, there's lots of variety to discover and tons of fun to be had! I want to offer several balance related suggestions:
- The first match is currently among the biggest obstacles with weaker starting builds being underequipped for dealing with high-end first opponents. I've had a couple of 10 minute starting matches that I ultimately ended up losing. Accelerant elixir wins the first match every time, but honey slime and catalyst elixir users are at a big disadvantage against any slime or growth themed opponents (new sticky elixir is very strong in the first match). While I think that all 3 have room for strong late-game builds, I recommend giving honey and catalyst starts stronger allure elixirs to compensate for the unreliable nature of their trigger mechanism. A weaker starting opponent could help ease new players into the game, and get players to the fun of build customization faster.
- Overflow related issues are completely fixed, great work! Some of the related strategies can feel slightly underpowered now and countermeasures like corruption and golden idols are very strong. Compression feels even stronger, and is currently an auto include for all builds, perhaps it should trigger on combination instead? With the cooking time changes, combining spirals, and negation chances, all overflow builds now have a place without being too dominant.
- I really like the coins and gems. However, they allow for some incredibly high allure generation, with most of my builds that defeat 10 or more witches all losing to a gem user. They may not need too much direct tuning, since most can be countered if overflow methods become stronger, or if there will be ways to prematurely cook the opponent's brew. I have also never seen tourmaline gems offered, are they in the player's pool? The gold growth effect they offer would be a handy counter to gem-based strategies.
- Opponents that use infinitely stacking effects like diamonds, rubies, charm elixirs, and sultry injections offer just one chance to win before the power scaling becomes too much to handle. However, this is not as big of an issue with virile elixirs and prophesy elixirs since they fill up the cauldron. A similar downside would help balance other stacking-allure ingredients, if they increase in size proportional to their added power or clog up your cauldron with useless steam clouds.
- Injections are an awesome addition, I really like how they work and the different new strategies they open up. Jams are also interesting, but I feel like jelly and strawberry could benefit from being single use with a reset to inventory after casting (like citrine gems).
- The new upgrade system is really cool, it feels like there's a good range of options. "Persistence" may be too strong of an offering and dissuades the purchase of eternal injections which require an extra step. "Consolidate" feels a bit awkward, but it does make sense as a way to shrink down ingredients if needed. Perhaps there could be an effect that exchanges the power of a sacrificed ingredient to those offered in the shop as a way to allow players to switch builds in late game?
- There are lots of situational counter effects that clog up your inventory when you don't need them. Picking what to use and when is a big part of the game, so a "side-pack" which you can add to your inventory if needed could add a layer of strategy and another direction for upgrades. For example a virile elixir user could keep a situational emerald gem to punish slime users, or a corruption elixir to prevent overflow. Tough opponents could also pull out new ingredients to adjust to your strategy.
The game is already lots of fun to play, so these suggestions are certainly not meant to be critical of the experience I've had, just a few ideas for how it could be rebalanced a bit! You have an excellent sense of gameplay design, and there are many other ways to improve the overall flow.
Good catch on the Tourmaline gem being absent, I'll fix that for the next update. Also really like the idea of sacrificing the potency of one the ingredients on your shelf to increase the potency of the ingredients offered on the reward screen - definitely making a note of that.
Yeah, the Catalyst Elixir especially might be a little underpowered atm. It suffers really hard from junk ingredients.
The concept of some kind of sideboard is definitely interesting - I'll have to consider how I'd implement such a system. 🤔
I think that honey slime is the weakest. Like catalyst, it's vulnerable to misplacement, overfills, and idols, but unlike catalyst it's also loses to cook time manipulations. It also caps at reducing time by 8, requiring 4 drops, while accelerant requires just 2 drops even at level 4. Perhaps honey slime should decrease brew times by 1 on infuse? That way you'd only need 2 to brew at max level, so it will have an advantage over accelerant by being synergistic with rose slime and easier to max out.
Stimulant injection is definitely the thing to switch to for a final build. I would take stimulant injections even if they were to become single use. Almost any offensive pair of level 6 elixirs with a persistence modification powered by stimulant injections can win infinitely. This isn't necessarily something that needs fixing, since there should be some sort of a finished combination to aspire towards, but I've gone infinite with a "carnal, bulging, growth, concentrated" combo, and a lightweight "mesmerizing, compression" combo.
Incredible work, I am already in love with all of the new additions, quality of life improvements, and thoughtful balance changes! I am very happy to see such a huge expansion to was easily one of my favorite new games of the year, thank you!
>Consolidate - Upgrades the chosen ingredient and downgrades all other held ingredients
Held on the shelf or in the bag? Kinda important distinction
on the shelf, otherwise that'd be waaay too big of a downside
I.... am confused at the thought process for a lot of this.
volume is nice but it does not persist on reload.
the starting decks is a great idea until you realize you cannot reroll them all without closing the game... and then once you do that a few times you realize these "random" decks are less than ideal. your options are slimes(but not blueberry) catalyst or accel, then all the expansion pots...just, why. the most advanced thing you can get is the eggplant potions, so if you think this update will let you start with hypno, cowbell, or hell, even blueberry... think again....
the nerf to cowbell feels like an overstep for how goddamned rare it was in the previous version, especially when hypno got buffed? Hah? wanna know the downside to getting 9 cowbells in your deck? spending 3 rounds upgrading nothing, buying nothing, and just duping 2-3 bells eachround then getting walled by some bish with a expansion+selfshrink+cata deck.
sticky slime.... the opponent just gets to add to your side for free? cool, cool, glad to get slime walled first round because lmao you chose cata
what in the crap is gold....gold(the in play kind) is that type of thing where you see a dev make a whole bunch of balance changes to their game, and then they just pop out the most broken crap in the same update. golden idol is such an instant game over if you do not have anything that removes it...jeez....
Iounno, a lot of it feels overtuned or just, 2 step forward, 1 step back.
like hell, despite the changes to the shop we are still stuck with the 3 potions on the shelf to upgrade/buy...
Volume not persisting on reload was just a "better than nothing" measure. It was a very late addition to the the update, and given that I don't have any kind of save system in the game yet I didn't want to delay the update further implementing one.
The intention with the starting loadouts was specifically not to give the player anything *too* powerful. I still wanted players to have to trade for the good stuff, but there are probably a few more ingredients, like Blueberry, which would be perfectly acceptable and could offer more variety.
Yeah, the sticky slime might be slightly overtuned atm. It was pretty underpowered before, now it provides both good disruption and tempo. I'll also be keeping a close eye on the Idol.
I mean, you can jus Cast to get rid of the golden idol. It's only a major issue if you're using Catalyst, and Honey Slime to an extent IMO, since you can also just Gelatinous or Stimulant Syringe it away.
I do agree that the Cowbell nerf was a bit overtuned, but better over-nerfed than still overpowered.
Is the "Jams" part of the update name supposed to be... how the spiral and Persistent changes are supposed to fix getting perma-backfired?
oh no, there's actually some literal Jam Jar ingredients included in the new update as well ^^
Oh, neat!