Answering the most popular questions on Potion Craft Development

We know that it's been quite some time since the last major update to the game and that you've been eagerly awaiting news on when we'll finally have something new for Potion Craft.

We read all of your posts here on Steam, on the Discord server and social media every day, and today we'd like to answer the most common community questions. We hope that after reading this you'll have a better understanding of how our development processes are structured, how resources are allocated within the team, and why it takes so long to work on updates. Grab yourself a nice cup of tea and settle in!

The game was released about 9 months ago. Why has it taken you so long to release any updates?

To answer this question comprehensively, we will break it down into several parts.

Approach to Potion Craft development

Game development is a complex and time consuming process. From the very beginning we chose the path of big but infrequent updates instead of frequent smaller ones. First of all, this is because releasing updates in big chunks is more convenient and efficient in terms of development and resource allocation within the team. Also, releasing individual small patches can lead to a lot of bugs and errors, as many game elements and mechanics are highly dependent on each other. We will talk more about this a little further below.

Our core team consists of only 5 people. If we tackle a major update and some individual small improvements at the same time, development will slow down a lot. Of course, this does not apply to hotfixes, which are aimed at fixing critical bugs players may encounter. After major releases, we always follow the feedback and try to fix the most annoying bugs as soon as possible.

We have a huge number of ideas and plans that we would like to implement, but it all takes time.

Linking features and mechanics to each other

Since the game's release in Early Access, we have been working on new features and content on a daily basis. During development it became clear that the upcoming update is growing and becoming bigger than we originally anticipated.

In Potion Craft, many gameplay elements are closely linked, so you can't just pick up and update one in isolation from the other. For starters, we need to rework the core systems.

For example, in our roadmap we mentioned the reputation system. This system is linked to visitor queue generation, which in turn is linked to the way quests work. Therefore it's impossible to release an update where we only include the updated reputation system and don't change the quest system - they are too interconnected. And there are plenty of examples of such new features. We'll share a few of them below.

Additional content and community management

Apart from development, we occasionally need to get involved in creating different promo materials for the game, which we use here in the news, social networks, Discord, and other communication channels. These include, for example, pictures, gifs, trailers, devlogs and more. Of course the team at tinyBuild helps us a lot, but it's a process in which both parties – the publisher and us – are equally involved.

We work daily with the Potion Craft community. Apart from the traditional interaction with players, this also includes collecting and processing feedback that we take into account when developing updates.

Current World Situation

The main part of the Potion Craft development team comes from Russia and, unfortunately,