Voynich Cafe - Postmortem

What did I set out to do with this project? 

Game Jam & Theme: 

I made this for Acerola Jam, which was a 14 day solo only jam, with the theme "Aberration".

Elevator Pitch:

A cooking/potion game, based on the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, where success spawns a platonic solid, representing alchemical perfection, and failure spawns an aberration (one of the doodles from the margins of medieval manuscripts). 

Key Game Inspiration:

Potion Craft meets Chants of Sennaar

Key Design Goals: 

• Physics based click & drag system - ☑
  
• Potion Crafting System - ☑
• Randomized Villager Requests - ☑
• Natural/Emergent Discovery of Mechanics - ☑
• No reliance on writing or UI, only in world signals - ☑
• All items are physical and there is no inventory - ☑
• Aberrations steal items from you - ☑

Key Project Learning Objectives: 

• How to build a click & drag game in Godot - ☑
• How to create potion system in Godot - ☑
• How to build a recipe tracking system - ☑
• Use only custom art assets - ☑
• Add full sound design to a project - ☑

What did I achieve?

I completed a physics based Click & Drag system, that is better than any of the previous tutorials I could find, resulting in me writing a completely new tutorial. I also created enough unique assets in 14 days to create an asset pack to thank the community for all their great learning materials and assets. Overall, I completed by core design & learning goals that I set out to complete and

What is my key game design learning from this project? 

Thanks to the feedback of some friends that played this project, I believe I understand the key issue with this project, trial & error. The puzzles are essentially independent trial and error with little to no relevant knowledge gained from success or failure. That is, there is no key to allowing you to figure out the puzzle without trial and error. 

This makes the core mechanic of the game the antithesis of good puzzle design. In good puzzle design you should unlock some relevant revelation about the mechanics. I won't use trial & error as a puzzle mechanic again, and will actively try to minimize it.

I also learned a very valuable lesson about difficulty curves & problem spaces, in the initial version for the jam had far too many things happening at once to be able to learn it. I heavily reduced the scope in the first few minutes to help with that learning curve and to remove more of the mechanics. I also reduced the problem space from any of the recipes to just one. I'll be taking this learning forward as well.