After creating my previous project, Cocktailr, I had been playing a lot of the Steam release of Papa's Freezeria. With the thought of cocktails still fresh in my mind, I had an itch to recreate the Papa's freezeria game-loop but making fruity little adult drinks.

Inspired by other games like Potion Craft, Stardew Valley, and Coffee Talk, my scope started running away from me at the speed of light. But I chased it down, reduced it back to a crawl, and put it out of its misery. The First Release, proof-of-concept game would be a single screen with a limited number of recipes, where the only progression is unlocking different ingredients.

To begin development, I started using the only Game Engine I knew how: Unity. After a week or two of development in Unity I had come to a stand-still in terms of motivation. I found that Uni had too many ways to do the same thing, with lots of pre-defined Objects, structures, and patterns; and none of them quite matched what the functionality I had in mind. This is a little bit hypocritical, as I really like JavaScript, but I wanted something a little more limited, with fewer building blocks to learn so that I could focus my efforts on how best to put them together.

Thus, a budding game engine, free, open-source, specializing in 2D games, and comprised of nothing but Nodes and Scripts, Godot, caught my eye. Wow that was a lot of commas. I tend to be a bit comma-heavy if I'm honest; just know that I'm aware and I'm working on it. Additionally, I created pixel art to use as assets for the game, as its relatively easy to pick up and trace things - difficult to master but I'm not worried about mastering anything in this project.

So armed with all these tools, I created a pretty solid MVP of this game using minimal outside assets and scripts. I'd love to revisit this again sometime when I'm a little older, wiser, and more determined.