Pretty Powerful Potions
Forage for ingredients, craft potions, equip spells, and defend your towers from the army of stone golems. Choose adorable summons with their own unique abilities to help you.
Role: Game Designer / Level Designer / Producer / Environment Artist
Team: 5 people
Engine: Godot
Development time: 3 months
Tools: Photoshop, Github
Game & Level Design
I designed and balanced...
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10 levels
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Enemy encounters
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Potion system
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Spells
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Tower guardians
My goal was to create a progression system that gradually introduced new mechanics while encouraging players to experiment with different strategies.
Tutorial Design
GOAL: Introduce the game's core loop without overwhelming the player.
I introduced the game's core loop in stages: exploration -> foraging -> crafting -> combat.
Progression loop: Survive waves -> unlock new environment -> explore -> discover ingredients -> craft stronger potions -> gain new options for surviving harder waves.
The player can see three locked portals in the garden from the beginning of the game, creating a sense of curiosity about what lies beyond them. After successfully completing waves, players can choose which portal to unlock, rewarding them for surviving while giving them control over their progression.
Each new environment contains unique ingredients that can be gathered and used to craft new potions. These potions provide increasingly powerful options for defending the player's tower against the golems. Exploration is therefore directly connected to combat progression, giving players a reason to venture beyond the starting area.
Exploration & Progression
Strategic Tradeoffs
Each summon gives the player a unique advantage while introducing a tradeoff. For example, the Fox can heal the tower over time, but prevents the tower from attacking. This encourages players to consider the needs of each encounter before selecting their summon.
After each wave, players choose from new spells, summons, and abilities. I designed these choices to give players control over how their strategy develops, allowing different playstyles to emerge over the course of a run.
Player Driven Progression
Design Challenges & Iteration
Problem: The game's items relied heavily on chance, including which ingredients and spells the players could obtain. This limited the player's ability to make meaningful strategic decisions.
Solution: We introduced a system that allowed players to choose what they unlocked after completing each wave. They could choose the option that best suited their strategy.
Result: Players gained greater control over their progression and could make decisions based on the needs of their current run.
Challenge 1: Increasing Player Agency
Problem: The game included a large amount of player options across ingredients, potions, spells and summons. Balancing these systems while meeting our deadline risked making the game overly complex.
Solution: I helped narrow the available options around their intended gameplay purposes. Ingredients were used specifically for potion crafting, while the number of spells were reduced and selected around key combat needs such as crowd control and dealing with tankier enemies.
Result: We created a more manageable set of player choices while keeping the game's strategic elements intact.
Challenge 2: Balancing Player Options
Producer
As producer, I organized weekly team meetings, maintained milestone and asset tracking, managed the project burndown, and created an art bible to keep the team aligned on the game's visual direction.
Pitch Presentation
I pitched Pretty Powerful Potions to my classmates.
Art Bible
Ensured the artistic vision across the entire game.
Milestone, Burndown, Needed Assets Sheet
This sheet tracks key milestones, visualizes progress with a burndown chart, and lists all required assets, keeping the project organized and on schedule.
Environment Art
I created all of the Environment art in Pretty Powerful Potions, down to the tilemaps and props.
To save time, I created a reusable base for all of the greenhouse designs. Then, I created different groups within the greenhouse file to plan the right size and placement of the furniture assets.
To the right is the house I created and the roof that goes on top of it.
