Inspiration
Inspired by cozy games like Stardew Valley and our team's connection to nature, Dear Apothecary invites players to step into the life of the local Apothecary!
Dear Apothecary
As an apothecary, players accept tasks from the local townsfolk, collect ingredients in the forest, combine tinctures and potions, and receive thanks from their customers! Just watch out for the pesky chickens that are known for stealing an ingredient when they are feeling peckish.
How We Built It
Our team focused on two main goals during all stages of the development process: create engaging mobile gameplay and add unique character to the world with thoughtful designs. The meta users who worked on this project are: LeahElanaa, mary._.pletch, YeoulArt, and Pragyav.
Thanks to our simple and intuitive task-gathering system, users can start playing as soon as they enter the world. We created Meta Horizons Custom UIs with magical sparkles and chimes to direct players' attention to their next steps. Playful audio and visuals were programmed to provide feedback every time an ingredient is collected or a player's action is successful. The background sound was made by layering Audio Gizmos of forest sounds and a cute soundtrack publicly available in Meta Horizons.
Twenty-two TypeScript scripts were used to define the behavior of Dear Apothecary, including a data model for the Apothecary recipes and ingredients needed to solve the townspeople's quirky requests. Once the player leaves the spawn point clearing to explore the forest, the camera angle changes to first person for additional immersion.
To add a lighthearted challenge to the game, chicken NPC agents were developed to wander the forest and steal an ingredient if they get too close. While Dear Apothecary is a single-player game, we added a sense of competition and community by implementing the Meta Horizon leaderboard system to see which Apothecary can complete the most requests, collect the most ingredients... and who gets pecked by the most chickens!
Early on, the two artists on our team provided a pitch deck with art style boards, asset inspiration, and a detailed list of Apothecary ingredients inspired by their connections to traditional medicine. The charming setting of Dear Apothecary is full of original models and textures from our artists. We also took advantage of some Meta Horizon Gen AI assets to streamline creation for more generic assets like the underlying terrain.
Overall, there are:
- 9 unique ingredients to collect
- Several custom trees and environment assets
- Bespoke 2D assets for UI
- Tens of Apothecary-core bottles, books, and flasks to build the ambience!
Challenges We Ran Into
From the beginning, Mary and Leah tried to get teammates from people they knew but with the competition spanning two months a lot of people didn't want to commit for that long. Halfway through the competition, Leah messaged Yeoul after finding her profile from the Participants tab in Devpost and she and Pragya joined on for asset creation!
The biggest challenge we faced was learning TypeScript from scratch and allocating time and energy to this project while working or attending school full time.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
We went into this competition wanting to create something playable and complete. While we're always thinking of new features to add, the submitted version of our game still accomplishes exactly what we set out to do — make a beautiful and playable game! Thanks to the Meta Horizons platform, we can share an easily accessible and playable version of Dear Apothecary with family and friends.
What We Learned
One of the biggest things we learned was the Meta Horizons Editor and TypeScript. While we had some experience with Unity and JavaScript, there was a lot of consulting the forums or documentation to address quirks we came across.
Thanks to our commitment to use the natural world as inspiration wherever possible, we also learned a lot about natural remedies and the plants that make them possible! Pragya and Yeoul made an awesome set of plants used as ingredients in the game and researched which ailments the plants are used to treat in real life. Mary and Leah used this list to create somewhat realistic Apothecary tasks and place ingredients where they would be found in a real forest, such as oyster mushrooms at the base of trees!
What's Next for Dear Apothecary
We would love to continue fleshing out the Dear Apothecary world with more custom assets and in-game lore! Part of our brainstorming that didn't make it in this version was to have "payments" of the Apothecary customers (gold, family heirlooms, or famous cupcakes) spawn as real assets the player could collect and arrange around their apothecary mixing table.
Built With
- blender
- metahorizons
- typescript
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