POTION EXPLOSION

Published by [ Horrible Guild ]

Developed by [ Studio Clangore ]

Steam iOS Android

About

Potion Explosion is a colorful puzzle-style board game where players take on the role of students brewing magical potions during their final exam. By selecting ingredient marbles from a dispenser and triggering satisfying chain reactions, players collect resources to complete potions and activate powerful effects. Each completed potion grants points and special abilities, encouraging clever combos and tactical choices. The student who crafts the most valuable potions and earns the most points becomes the top of the class.

Designing the tutorial

The design of the tutorial followed two main areas of focus: the need to explain the rules of the game, and the explanation of the specific interactions of the digital adaptation.

For the first, I relied on the content and structure of the rulebook from the original board game, which already does an excellent job of guiding the player through the rules (and, above all, the actions the player can take during the game). For the second, we relied on the list of features that had been shared with the client (already formalized in a flowchart).

The tutorial also needed to be reasonably short and enjoyable even for players who, coming from the board game, were already familiar with the rules and simply needed to understand how to interact with the game.

Putting it all together

As a first step, we opted for an interactive tutorial. Although more costly in terms of development, we had already evaluated its positive aspects, effectiveness, and low abandonment rate through previous projects. Given the relative flexibility of the product, it was also easy to set up a board situation built ad hoc to test all the interactions that would be included.

The “protagonist” of the tutorial would have been the Professor, who is also the narrator in the rulebook. This choice would influence both the copy and the layout through which messages are presented during the tutorial.

The tutorial was eventually designed through a step-by-step process inside an excel document; to better communicate with the team of developers, each step was described either as a static message in a popup, an interaction by the player, or an animation/game feedback. Later, a placeholder column was also added to start working on the copy (which was later added to the official copywrite repository).

Some of the topics covered by the tutorial include: