Box Brewery

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  Recipe book storing new and undiscovered potion recipes

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  Unlocking a new potion

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  Example dialogue with a customer

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  Title Screen

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  Order screen to talk with customers and take orders

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  Pause Menu

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  How to play screen for new players, in temporary place of a tutorial

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  One still from the introductory cutscene

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  End credits image, hand-drawn in MS Paint by the team

Inspiration

Box Brewery was inspired by cafe simulator and sandbox games like Coffee Talk, Papa's Freezeria, and Little Alchemy. When we were brainstorming, we considered a magical/sci-fi garden game, but we figured that might be a common idea in a hackathon themed around Stardew Valley. The alternative to nurturing plants? Nurturing people (in a small, morally dubious business)! Or rather, not people! Since you turned into a cat, you'll be making potions for other animals. The possibilities for silly character storytelling skyrockets.

What It Does

It's a game. You play it. It doesn't really do much on its own. We did consider making an idle game, though.

Maybe you will be relaxed. That is one of our goals. Maybe you will even have fun. That is another goal of ours.

Perhaps the better question is what the player does: mix various ingredients to create different potions. Each customer wants a different potion for a different reason, and will give the player other ingredients in exchange. The player eventually gathers all the ingredients and makes the potion that turns them back into a human.

How We Built It

We made Box Brewery with Unity Engine, and we made our art/music assets with MS Paint, Ibis Paint, and MuseScore. We used Visual Studio with C#, since that's what's used in Unity. We also used Visual Studio Code to resolve Git merge conflicts. Since it's a Unity project, half of the codebase is code interpretations of assets and scenes. Github classifies these as Shaderlab, HLSL, and Wolfram Language.

Challenges

We spent a fair amount of time iterating over our initial ideas, so we didn't actually start on coding or drawing final assets until the night of the kickoff event. We eventually stuck with an idea that we could both fit the themes with and conceivably complete.

We also had problems with developing the art style and with working in Unity, such as matching character sprites and persistent merge conflicts with specific assets.

Accomplishments

We made a game! It looks pretty neat! And we did it all in less than 36 hours! All of the assets (including music) were made by us, with exception of sound effects.

What We Learned

Creative collaboration and team-task organization were skills that all of us were glad to develop. With respect to game development, we also learned to frequently consider the player experience.

What's Next for Box Brewery

We have a solid framework for adding ingredients, potions, and customers. We plan to add more ingredients and potions to vary the game a bit more and make gameplay longer. Additionally, we also plan to redesign some characters for stylistic purposes. Our most ambitious next step would be a sequel game, since this one ends after the cat turns back into a human witch. Adding more gameplay content would be as simple as making the assets and plugging in values to our scenes.

Built With

• c#
• ibispaint
• microsoftpaint
• musescore
• unity