Potion craft and its lovingly well-crafted UI

“Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator” is an indie videogame designed by Niceplay Games. At the moment it is yet being developed, and can be played in early access mode. The game is, in my humble oppinion, stable and rich enough to give you many hours of fun. I’m sure it will be even better once completed, but one thing that is already at the peak of its greatness, and which makes my soul jump of pure happiness, is the UI. Through this article I’m going to explore some of the reasons that make it so amazing to my eyes.

A seamless visual experience

• Everything in this game is 2D. The UI shares the same drawing style than the enviroments and characters, so it just looks like another component of the story. It looks less invasive thanks to that, and creates a perfect sense of inmersion.
• The chosen style suits perfectly with the subject of the game. You are an alchemist who brews and sells potions, so the visual style plus the great, soft medieval music easily gets you in the mood.

A great choice of colors

The whole game feels like a tale, and the feeling grows thanks to the colors. The soft oak browns and papery creams resemble ancient books, while the rest of the palette follows the main colors with dark reds, brownish greens, muted oranges… I’m no color theory expert, but it is easy to see how well all of them match together.

Clearly structuralized menus

I will take the trading menu as an example, which I specially like, since it allows you to sell and buy products within the same deal.

As you can see in the image, the structure is pretty clear:

• To the left, the merchant’s inventory.
• At the center, the products that the player has chosen to either buy or sell to the merchant.
• To the right, the player stats, access to other menus and inventory.

Interactions are very straight forward. To add an item to the deal, the player just needs to click on it from the inventory window, and see how it moves into the trading window. The item can be easily take off from the deal by going to the trading window and clicking on it, it will move back into its proper inventory.

An elegant, responsive UI

To be entirely satisfying, the interface needs to reflect which elements are clickable, show their current status and adapt whenever they change. This should be a must, no matter the videogame or product. It makes a great difference when it is not delivered properly, causing frustration and uneasiness. Potion Craft has it really well covered:

Elegant button states: All clickable elements in the game (except hidden treasures) have some type of hover state. The difference with the idle state is in many cases very subtle, but enough to see that an element can be interacted with. The game hadles quite a few patterns, using one or another according to the situation, but keeping them in the same style, changing the background to a lighter or darker color, and sometimes adding a growth animation to emphasize an element.

The cursor: it adapts to the different types of assets, indicating to the player without major explanation if an asset can be grabbed or not. This concept is not innovative, but it is so pleasant to see it applied.

Tooltips: adecuate information at the right time

In many cases information has different levels of hierarchy, and not all information needs to be visible at all times. To achieve this, tooltips are a standard that I will never grow tired of. They allow to hide information that you may need while playing but don’t want to be constantly seeing unless you ask for it. In this game, the designers use tooltips constantly, allowing the main HUD to have very little text and keeping it clean.

As you can notice in the previous image, they use two types of tooltips:

• Small tooltip: As a reminder of the asset name or for a very short description.
• Extra big tooltip: for important features with more information associated that you may not know by heart.

Floating notifications

These appear in situations where the action was triggered by a visible element in the environment.

• When gathering an ingredient, they show the amount you have collected.
• When closing a deal with a customer, they show the reputation you have gained or lost, the money and the points of popularity obtained.

In the image above, you can see that these type of notifications appear right next to the element you were interacting with. Since it appears right at the place you are looking at that moment, the message is really easy to notice and read, helping to understand without effort which actions modify the player stats or inventory.

This game is full of other reasons to love its UI

The potion’s path in the alchemist map, the micro-interactions scattered all through the game, the small notifications for your book entries, or how they use the accent colors for success and warning states, which look beautifully integrated with the rest of the palette…

Not only the UI

• Great music. I do not grow tired of it, even after listening it for hours.
• Cool mechanics that I can’t properly analyze from a design perspective for it’s not my area, but that I certainly love while playing.
• A great array of potions to make, and imaginative situations given by your customers, sometimes even having to guess their needs.
• An impresive amount of different dialogues for an early access game. They didn’t start to repeat until I had played for several hours.
• Some special characters I didn’t expect in the game (I will not tell, to not spoil the fun).

I just named some of the details that I enjoyed while playing. I’m eager to see how this game keeps on growing and expanding. It is, in my humble opinion, a great game.