A clearly intended dynamic of Potion Craft is management of herbs. People come and request various potions, there are plenty of ways to make any potion and so the player is expected to manage what they have with what they expect to make. A second dynamic is exploring the potion map. Naturally, you spend a lot of time crafting the potions of the game and navigating the potion map to do so.

These two dynamics are in sharp conflict with each other. The first asks you to be careful with your raw materials and the second pushes you to waste them experimenting. Often conflicting dynamics can work in a game’s favor. They can provide a decision space with competing interests and so maintains depth for the player.

In Potion Craft, this does not emerge. Choosing to defer experimentation is both uninteresting and unfun for the player. Knowing when you need the results of an experiment is guesswork as is projecting what materials you might need.

A potential solution could have been allowing the player more power over navigating the map through material conversions. For instance, if one could treat a root that takes you down the map and convert it to something that takes you up instead, possibly at reduced efficiency, that would dramatically reduce the tension, albeit by simply reducing the challenge animating both dynamics and the challenge of the game as well.

The solution that the game adopts is to allow the player to purchase materials to make up for the shortfalls that a random garden and random requests generate. This similarly breaks the challenge of the game. It pushes the tuning such that missing a request does little harm to the player and such that they will tend towards a surplus of cash. Additionally, it pushes the player to online guides which take away most of the experimentation altogether.

This leaves us in a tough spot. These are both dynamics that are important to the game and their conflict results in both being hobbled. Possibly a solution that grants the player more autonomy and does more to locate the tension into a single decision point so that the conflict can become a trade-off would clean this up. However, it’s also possible in a situation like this that the best choice is simply to pick which of the dynamics is most in tune with your game and foreground only that one.