Third place + Development trivia + future plans

If you haven't heard, Potion Panic placed third overall in GB Compo 2025! I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some random development trivia about the game, as well as some of my future plans. 

Originally, I wanted to make a Wario Land inspired platformer for my GB Compo entry, but I decided in the end to keep things simple and make a kinda-sorta single screen platformer in the vein of Bubble Bobble. I had an idea to make a Halloween-themed platformer where you play as a witch, and figured I'd take the opportunity to flesh it out - although when I drafted the story I ended up dropping the whole witch thing.

Here's the first sprite I made of Natalie:

As you can probably tell, she was originally a bit plumper. I didn't like how this sprite turned out so I ended up revising it soon after:

After that I made the first enemy sprite - the frog. Originally it was supposed to attack with its tongue, but I never got around to implementing it. I made a mockup GIF to workout the animation for the frog (including the scrapped tongue attack), here it is:

Here's a few other things that ended up on the cutting room floor: a cauldron meant for an intro cutscene, a fly meant as a random environmental detail (frogs would try to eat them), an alternate "casual" outfit for Natalie, Natalie riding her broom Boris (meant for an unimplemented stage intro cutscene), Natalie doing a cute twirl (for an unimplemented stage outro cutscene), and a slime enemy I never got around to programming in. I really like how the twirl animation came out, it's a shame I didn't end up using it in the demo.

As far as future plans go, I'm planning to put out a bugfix patch to iron out some of the rough edges of the GBCompo demo, including a particularly nasty softlock that I unfortunately only caught after the submission deadline.

The next step after that will be to rework the music to make use of a new sound driver I've been working on, named DevSound X2. For the GBCompo demo I used my GBMod engine (designed to play back FastTracker II .XM modules) to save time, but in hindsight the audio quality suffered a bit due to this decision.

For the final game, I want to have 5 worlds, each with 8 levels and a boss fight. World 1 is the forest world featured in the demo. World 2 (Sandy Ruins) will be an ancient Egypt inspired desert world. Here's a sneak peek:

Stay tuned for more news...