The Brew & The Process

NOTE: This is a repost from my website's own game dev blog.

A New Journey

I worked on this text-based game in my first year of BA Game Writing for the course Game Prototyping 1 as part of a group project which was a joint course for Game Design and Game Writing students. 

I'm excited to share this project with you as this is the first game I ever made without any prior knowledge to game-making, so I feel quite proud of this project. Having only iterated the game this year, it still keeps the same core today as it did in 2021 when it was first created. 

It's really just a fresh update with fun additions of the old version. And less typos. Heh. 

Magical Chemistry 

My partner is an organic chemist for a living and is truly passionate about what he does, even though I don't understand any of it. He works with chemicals all the time, and in a fantasy setting, potions are technically just magical chemicals. 

So I thought: magic? That I can do. Chemistry? Not so much. 

My partner means the world to me, and I wanted to make something fun and creative. And what better than to make a game inspired by his work, even if I don't understand it? After all, I do have my imagination to help with that. Making stuff up is half the fun!

So I got to work. 

The game is set in a fantasy universe where you are the apprentice of a so-called master potioneer who is your superior. Unfortunately for you, they have vanished and now you have to take care of the shop you're apprenticing at. Oof!

So, your first customer steps into the shop and it turns out to be none other than the local crazy man Hedvig the Insane. And this man wants a love potion. Pronto. 

Your character, being an apprentice, has limited knowledge when it comes to potion-making. You know the theoretical parts of it, but in practice? Nope. At this point, it's up to the player to wing it. Kind of like how you'd wing a math test. It's all faith and crippling anxiety, baby!

That's the crux of the gameplay without giving anything away, of course. 

You'll have to play The Brew yourself. 

Development Process

I worked together with my group partner who was a really cool game development student. We sat together in one of the computer rooms and got to working on the story and Twine itself. 

To my recollection, various iterations in the game were a bit tedious to work on. Personally, the biggest issue I faced was figuring out how to do the mixing of the ingredients part of the game as I was interested in adding the options of choosing one ingredient at a time. 

The issue with doing that is that having many different combinations will end up yielding many different results. This would be too much to deal with (and write) in such limited time. We opted in on giving two basic choices with different ingredient options to choose from, giving the player room for guessing what would be the best combination.

When it came to the general branching dialogue we had to make it straight-forward. The assignment was to follow a specific branching-pattern, so we had to stick to that, which meant that not every choice would actually change the outcome of the game. Just different text.

In the end, when the writing and the prototyping was done, we would have two separate seminars with feedback from fellow students. It was fun hearing opinions on what people thought of the gameplay and story, which I thought was really helpful for me as a writer. 

General Conclusion 

If I had more time and the freedom to choose the way the branching pattern would go in terns of narrative, it would've been different. But at the time, we had to follow the assignment and when the assignment was given we were all very new to Twine. 

I also did not have a lot of experience with Twine itself, so it would've been too ambitious of me to branch out in an engine I had minimal understanding of. 

Still, I had a blast writing and it was great to have creative freedom for my first Twine-game. 

If you're interested in playing the game: 

The Brew is now available to play on itch.io and can be played in your browser! 

If you want to try a different ending, just refresh your page and that should do the trick. There are four endings and they all have their little charming twists. I am really fond of them all, so I can't really choose my favorite ending. 

Maybe you'll find yours?

// Monica