New Game Updates for 2024
New Year, New Game
We here at Laserblast Studios have been working on a new game with a new game development process for the last two months. We are currently developing a potion shop simulator (name still TBD) where you manage a potion shop, forage for ingredients and explore worlds beyond magical portals.
Previously we had been working on a point-and-click adventure game called Thin Ice which we've decided to put on hold for the time being. The goal is to finish Thin Ice eventually - we still love and believe in this game! All of the Thin Ice puzzles and story are designed, but the development of a point-and-click is a huge endeavor which has been challenging to undertake while we are working full time day jobs.
Additionally, our passion is watching people actually play the games that we make. The nature of making a narrative puzzle game means it can be hard to playtest early on in the development cycle. There are many parts of Thin Ice that we've been working on for years and have not been able to get in front of players. While the potion shop game is a huge undertaking, we'll be able to build out the game in smaller content chunks which means getting playable pieces of the game in front of players faster.
We can't wait to get bits of this game in front of you, the players, but for now we're working on some of the base game aspects. The first aspect is getting the potion shop assembled so that players can move around in it.
Designing a Potion Shop - How to get around?
When we were originally brainstorming about the layout of the potion shop, the initial idea was having the shop be in an old castle tower with multiple floors. When the player upgraded the tower, which is a future feature we'd like to implement, they'd get floors added to it to keep growing upwards. A vine-covered castle tower felt thematic and interesting, but we didn't anticipate how challenging designing staircases would be.
A whiteboard featuring some initial brainstorming for how a tower and staircases might be laid out.
When designing a staircase, we wanted moving between floors of the castle tower to feel seamless. In the original design, the staircase looped back on itself like a spiral staircase. It was initially design this way to save space, but we kept running into a problem: if the staircase doubled back on itself, the player character would accidentally be sent back to the floor they just left unless they stopped pressing the down or up button fast enough. Additionally staircases ate up a ton of floor space, cutting in on space players can maneuver and customize.
Pressing on the down key risks accidentally sending the player back up the staircase they just descended if the staircase loops back on itself.
To solve this problem, we ultimately decided it was worth more to avoid the annoying problem of moving from floor to floor or risking accidentally walking back up the stairs you just came down than having the player character live in a tower. It's less thematic, but we still have hope for a cool, witchy, thematic house you can live in and decorate. In the future when the shop can be upgraded, players will build outwards rather than upwards to give easier freedom of movement.
Now the potion shop is laid out on one floor except for where players will enter into the portal realms. The building players start the game with includes the atelier, the bedroom and the shopfront.
The first and most basic layout that players start the game with will hold the player's bedroom, the atelier where potions are mixed, and the shopfront. When players walk through a door in the potion lab, they will enter the cellar where the portal doors are located.
A brief tour of what’s been developed so far. The current build utilizes programmer art, so it works well but doesn’t look very nice…yet!
So far we've implemented being able to walk around your home / shop, enter a portal world and pick a few ingredients. We've also toyed with the speed of the player character so it feels easy to get around but not too slow as to be a drag.
More updates to come next month on how we've designed the potion-brewing mechanic!
