Interview – Potions: A Curious Tale developer Renee Gittins

Renee Gittins is someone I’ve always admired. She’s a real success story in the games industry and I’ve seen her go from a budding newbie to a mistress of the dark arts of game development over the years. It’s no wonder that her magnum opus, Potions: A Curious Tale, focuses on a young witch coming into her own while running her grandmother’s apothecary.

Over the past decade, she’s been double, double, toil, and troubling away on Potions: A Curious Tale. It’s finally coming out on March 7th, 2024 for Steam PC. 

So, I wanted to sit down and chat with her before the launch because we at Comfy Cozy Gaming, are huge fans of cozy games like this (obviously). If you’re reading this, you likely are as well. So, let’s dig into the interview.

The Curious Tale of Potions: A Curious Tale

Hey Renee! So, the first question I have is a simple one. What exactly is Potions: A Curious Tale?

Potions: A Curious Tale is an adventure-crafting game where your wits are your greatest weapons and combat is not always the answer. You play as a young witch named Luna, who has recently discovered her ability to brew magical potions. She uses these potions as spells to solve puzzles and gather rare ingredients from monsters on her quest to become a Potions Master.

Luna lives in a world inspired by fairy tales and folklore from around the globe, from African folklore to Western nursery rhymes. Luna’s wit and intellect help her overcome the challenges posed by these enchanted lands. On her journey, she also learns important coming-of-age lessons in the tongue-in-cheek storyline: Respect is earned, advice can be deceiving, and adults aren’t always right.

What inspired you to dedicate a decade of your life to making this game?

When I first started designing and developing Potions, it was just intended to be a portfolio piece, not an actual product. As I began to share its development with my peers, it received a lot of interest and support. Thus, I decided to put together a Kickstarter campaign to see if there was enough interest in the game to properly develop it, and the Kickstarter funded in the last 15 minutes of the campaign! I didn’t want to cut any corners in the development, so I worked on it for all of these years to make it the best possible game that I could. 

Speaking of inspirations, what were the biggest inspirations for the game itself?

One of the main frustrations I wanted to address was that progress in games often feels gated behind grinding for experience. Many roleplaying games reward the player for slaughtering every creature they see, which doesn’t feel like very heroic behavior to me. 

While sometimes combat is necessary in Potions: A Curious Tale, the resource system requires players to avoid direct fights and approach enemies in creative ways to get the ingredients they need, instead of getting experience for every tiny bunny slaughtered.

Circling back, you mentioned a lot of world mythologies earlier. How did you craft the worldbuilding and characters? Can you elaborate on the resources used for the fairy tales and mythologies?

My mother received her Master’s degree in Literature and I grew up with a wealth of myths and stories from cultures all around the world. I wanted Potions to feature stories and characters of cultural significance from all across the globe so that people could both learn about other cultures and see their own culture reflected in the game. I also have brought in fairy tales and folklore from around the world, including Sinbad, Baba Yaga, and Sun Wukong. There are Islamic legends, creatures from African lore, and tales from the One Thousand and One Nights.

I think it is so important to have a rich, diverse, and vibrant world with which players can relate. In fact, I wrote an entire whitepaper (found on the IGDA website) on inclusive game design and development to encourage other developers to take similar approaches.

Amazing! With the worldbuilding in place, how did you choose the enemies and antagonists of the game?

I relied both on folklore and themes to determine the enemy monsters and antagonist characters. 

One of the main themes I chose for Potions early on was “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” The design of Luna’s rival, Emily, is highly motivated by this theme– she’s beautiful, talented, and extremely rude to Luna. Players are repelled by Emily’s harsh words, but, as the story progresses, they start to realize that she might not actually be as cruel as she seems. 

The other main antagonist is Prince Charming, who captures the theme “adults/authority is not always right”– a lesson I think is one of the hardest to grapple with as we come of age. While almost all of the folklore in Potions: A Curious Tale stays relatively true to its source, Prince Charming acting spoiled, fearful, and pompous is a great catalyst for Luna to shine as the protagonist in a few of the Western fairy tales. 

Oftentimes, I’m easily frustrated with puzzles that I’m stuck on. Is the game entirely linear or can you do some puzzles in a different order? Can you skip any or are there hints at the least?

There are hints for every puzzle in Potions, though some hints are more hidden than others. Most of the basic puzzles give you a hint if you just interact with them. 

Many of the puzzles aren’t required to beat the game, but you need to solve almost all of them to collect the 56 Magical Cards that boost your health pool and provide achievements. You can always revisit a puzzle, none of them are ever locked by progression, though you will definitely find puzzles you may need to revisit later once you’ve unlocked different potion effects. 

Do you have any tips for players grabbing Potions: a Curious Tale on day one?

It’s okay to run away! There is a lot of benefit to running from monsters in Potions: A Curious Tale. You may find helpful secrets while fleeing, such as hazards nearby that you can use to defeat enemies and unlock rare ingredients. I see some longtime gamers take a traditional “I must kill every creature I see” approach, which is a lot more difficult to manage. Potions: A Curious Tale is absolutely about walking the middle path between violence and pacifism and finding the balance that allows you to achieve your goals without wasting your resources. 

A secret that many players miss is that you can defeat almost every boss without any potions at all! In fact, only one boss requires any aggressive potions to overcome, and those potions aren’t used against the boss itself. 

Working in game dev is hard. What would you say were the biggest speedbumps while making Potions?

Maintaining motivation over this last decade has absolutely been the most difficult part, especially when I’ve dealt with extremely difficult personal challenges: I have lost a few extremely close friends during this development, including one of our team members; I struggled through an extremely rough mental health episode with near paralyzing depression; and I even lost my beloved cat, the namesake of my studio and the inspiration for Helios, Luna’s cat familiar, just four weeks before Potion’s launch date. 

Making Potions nearly single-handedly was likely tough. I’m sure you had some help at Stumbling Cat, though. Tell me about them and what they did along the way.

Oh, gosh, I’ve had so many people help me along the way, from official team members to my game development friends who have provided advice and words of support. My skills in art and audio are quite poor, so the majority of people who have worked on Potions have helped me with those aspects. I think it is extremely important to credit everyone who has contributed, whether they only worked on a single asset or contributed hundreds of hours towards the development. 

In total, I’ve had 19 people contribute to various parts of the game. Jake Neal, our environment and prop artist, has been on the project with me since nearly the beginning. Atlas Lin beautified the game with his character art and animations, including the gorgeous intro animation. Major Bruno, Joshua Du Chene, and Sunglae Park all added to the compelling soundscape of the game. And, Kristen Scherer and Gregor Smith contributed amazing design ideas, particularly for the later Temples and boss encounters. 

Finally, my own fiancee, Zak Whaley, recently helped me add controller support and localization for 11 different languages. I am so honored to have been able to work with such inspirational developers on this journey. 

If you could go back to the beginning, what would you have done differently to make things smoother for yourself?

I don’t think I would have run a Kickstarter. I absolutely adore my Kickstarter backers and their support. They are truly an invaluable community. However, every delay in the game’s launch left me with a huge sense of guilt and, occasionally, some rather harsh messages! 

Running a Kickstarter also requires you to frontload a lot of art and audio work that normally would be reserved for later in the development, and much of that work had to be redone as the development progressed. In the future, I hope to share my game development journey to help others, so perhaps I will start a Patreon or another funding strategy focused less on the release of the game itself. 

I’ve been following Potions since the first time I ever saw you first post about it. When you started the project a decade ago, how close was the original vision to the final 1.0? Was there anything that you miss from old versions that ultimately got removed?

Most of the core systems of Potions: A Curious Tale were implemented in at least a rudimentary manner at the beginning, but many of the secondary systems, such as puzzle logic, elemental interactions, and the bestiary, were implemented later. The vast majority of time spent on Potions has simply been the development of content. There are 31 main levels in the game and over 70 levels in total, plus 15 major sections of the story. It’s a ton of content to build, script, and integrate! 

The crafting system has been the most troublesome system. It’s on its third iteration now, and I’m finally happy with how it feels. I wanted it to feel fun to experiment with crafting, which required a very strategic approach to reward the player for making guesses about ingredients. 

Now that the game is done, do you plan to add more to the base game? Are there any plans for Potions: A Curious Tale 2?

I am hoping to do console ports next and plan to add a bit to the game for both the PC and console versions. I definitely have some more puzzles and challenges that I would love to share with players!

As for a second title, that remains to be seen. I definitely have some ideas knocking around that could work well for another adventure in the Potions universe. 

You’ve done other things within the game industry as well, in fact even being called something of a “unicorn” in the game industry. Can you tell me more about yourself and what’s led you to this moment?

My path in the game development industry has been supported by so many wonderful developers, and I always want to make sure that I am giving back to this amazing community and industry so that the next generation of developers can be similarly supported. 

Uplifting others to do their best brings me so much joy, and much of my career has been supporting other game developers, whether it’s as a producer, a general manager, or even as the executive director of the IGDA. I have advocated for healthy work cultures, diversity, and inclusion in the game industry. 

The IGDA is a big deal. Tell me more about some of what you did there as the executive director.

At the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), I was able to create resources like “Inclusive Game Design and Development”, which promote more equitable and diverse games and game development. As a leader in the game industry, I feel responsible for ensuring that we all are given the opportunity to pursue truly sustainable careers. 

I am very lucky to have been honored with positions where I could truly impact the lives of other game developers and improve the game industry for us all. 

I know you studied engineering in school. How did you go from that right into game development? What was the mindset that led to that happening?

I have always been hungry for knowledge. I actually worked in biotech for a while as I was planning my entry into the game development industry. It was only my senior year of college that I even realized I could be a game developer, and it was too late to change my major to computer science. 

While I was in biotech, I started studying programming on the side, and was able to convince my company to let me transition from the mechanical to the software team. It was a great opportunity to hone my development skills during the day as I networked and worked with indie teams during the night. My biotech company even asked me to develop minigames as part of their concussion testing suite, which was an invaluable experience as I was starting my game development career. 

Once I left biotech, I did find getting my initial foothold in the game industry to be a lot more difficult than I had imagined. That difficulty led me to create Potions as a portfolio piece, however, so I think it still put me on the right path! 

As that “unicorn”, you’re one of the few women that are in gamedev who inspire girls to also get into gamedev constantly. What advice would you give them that you wish you had when you began? Are there any tips that you’d give to the gamedev community as a whole?

You can do it. You can be a game developer. You can follow your dreams. 

The best way to become a game developer is to start right now. Download a game engine, follow a tutorial, make a mod, join a game jam, just get started and you’ll find your path as long as you keep pushing forward. 

Last question: It’s obvious what the answer will be, but can you pet the cat, Helios?

Of course! Helios may be a bit of a sourpuss, but he definitely enjoys pets. You can only pet him in Old Haven so he doesn’t get underfoot, but there is even an achievement for petting him! There is actually one other character in the game that enjoys pets too, but I won’t spoil that secret. 

Okay, last last question: Do you plan to make plushies of Helios to be able to pet in person?

Yes! Helios plushies have been a dream of mine for a long, long time. I’ve actually already spoken with vendors to find the best approach and I hope to pursue their creation after the launch of Potions: A Curious Tale— even if it’s just to have one of my own! However, I am sure that I am not the only one who wants their own adorable and sassy feline companion. 

Thank you so much for your time! The game looks amazing and I hope the launch goes smoothly. You deserve a break after a decade!

You can pick up Potions: A Curious Tale on March 7th, 2024 on Steam for PC. It will be $19.99, but will have an additional 15% discount at launch. Renee also assured me that the game works “wonderfully” on the Steam Deck and is currently awaiting certification once the game launches.