SUMMARY

Midnight Concoctions is a game about working as a minimum wage employee at a magical convenience store, where you brew potions to solve the problems of your wacky customers.

Big thanks to Ryan Li our main developer and Tray Chen who did most of the lovely art and 3D modeling. My role primarily focused on design – conceptualizing the mechanics and player experience, building the potion calculations system, and crafting the narrative.

INTERACTION

Before we started building the game, it was important the whole team was on the same page about how it would actually play. I mapped out all key interactions in these diagrams:

UI

Some iterations I ran through for dialogue boxes. We ended up choosing the generic one since the rest of the game’s visuals were already pretty maximalist.

NARRATIVE

I made the decision early on to have all ingredients be adjacent to real-world products but with a magical spin, rather than purely fantasy-themed. This created more opportunities for worldbuilding and leaned into the contrast of the monotonous meeting the fantastical. Here’s some of my favorites:

GAMEPLAY-STORY INTEGRATION

One of the biggest challenges of writing for this game was writing dialogue and flavor text that simultaneously read organically, built the world and characters, and also hinted at what potions would be successful and how to make them.

I added a “check” feature for characters: three selectable options that each give context on a different problem the character is facing and keyword hints on a potential potion to fix it.