July 2020 - July 2021
P4P is a medieval roleplaying game where you play as an alchemist in a strange island city. Grow a variety of plants, harvest them for ingredients, and brew your own potions to sell to customers.
For the duration of the project, I maintained a Patreon page (currently disabled) and kept up to date with my Patrons. The experience helped me with learning to scope my work, and with understanding all the pitfalls with early design which can lead to problems later in a project (and the unfortunate reworking of foundational systems).
Potions for Peasants is meant to be a shopkeeper like game, inspired by games like Shoppe Keepe, with an alchemy system inspired by alchemy systems such as the one in Skyrim.
I chose this design space because of an interest I always have had in progression based games. Also it felt like a solid idea I could work on for a year to get a feel of the design process and make many foundational mistakes to learn from.
As the sole developer, I tackled the programming and design of the game completely. Many of the art assets were either purchased or commissioned.
The alchemy system was a large part of the game and ended up getting reworked multiple times. From this I learned the importance of strong foundations for a project. Mistakes I had made early on in the design ended up causing problems later on. For instance, the integration of an ability score system required me to go back through and rework the system as it was something I had planned on extending.
As a Design and Programming focused developer, a big lesson I learned was the importance of art. It didn't matter how strong I made my mechanics while in a bland world. Once I added in a beautiful island, people could finally understand my prototype and see the potential. This was a great experience learning to both utilize asset packs, as well as deal with commissioning artwork.
