Potions and Polycules
Welcome to Potions and Polycules!
"In a distant land there was a coven of witches. All of them longed for the love of the others but for one reason or another, none found it within themselves to admit it. That was until a patron of the coven came to them requesting a love potion, and so began a contest to brew the ultimate love potion - with each witch secretly pursuing a far greater prize than mere gold."
Have fun!
Web version available for your convenience, but standalone recommended for more stable performance.
Download
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Development log
- ✨The Future✨Aug 26, 2025
- Potions and Polycules - Jams and Gems UpdateAug 20, 2025
- Potions and Polycules Discord ServerJul 24, 2025
- Emergency milk nerfsMar 02, 2025
Comments
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Stumbled across this recently and it's been a solid game, looking forward to more completed systems/progression listed in the dev log. Personally would love to see the player select a witch similar to Balatro decks where they have a predefined look, kit, and maybe gimmick? It's a bit tedious with the randomized potion selection each run. (would also be nice to let the player customize their witch using the already existing assets too if premade looks are out of the question)
Recommend also tweaking some values anything that does a stacking effect is incredibly strong, and beats out doing a lot of other fun tf stuff, which is a bit of shame when you want to win and embreasten the opponent. From my playing charm elixir especially becomes busted insanely fast for both the player and npcs.
Given the last post was in august I'm sure there's been plenty of balance consideration and I'm sure y'all are handling things just fine. Excited to see more and best of luck with getting funding!
I want to know. Why I open download version of this game and it show only blackscreen and have just sound of the game? Is it come from godot problem?
Is this the latest version? Can you tell me your specs?
hmm, I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you then. Sounds like some kind of engine compatibility issue 😔
Great Update. I finally got an op build that no one could beat.
any word on new developments?
The Discord link seems to be broken FYI
It's a really enjoyable game! Loving the gameplay and the art!
There are just few issues I have, wanted to mention them so you can improve the experience <3
1) Debuffs can stack up way too fast (Bovine, spiral, to lesser extent eggplant)
2) Wish you could pick preferred character to start as <3
3) Really hope this game can reach more people cuz it's great
Getting a regular issue where the opponent gets a negative time. The game continues on, but I can neither win nor lose at that point.
why it doesn't load, the game just break my pc. I have tried to load it on 3 different devices and it hasn't worked on any of them. I even did a bat to try to load but nothing works
@echo off
cd /d "%~dp0"
start "" godot.exe --rendering-driver opengl3 --resolution 1200x600 --windowed
exit
I believe the persistent debuffs should be removed from the potion after it overflows a few times. Getting stuck in endless overflow loops has been the bane of my existence.
it would be nice if there was a way to save your progress/retry after losin
This is definitely the most unique Suika-like I've seen, it's great so far!
If you're looking for feedback or ideas, could I suggest adding some kind of 'shop' (maybe every 3-5 battles) where you can trade the witches you've recruited to your polycule to other polycules in exchange for more powerful potions, or different shapes/sizes of beakers? Also, some sort of grimoire of what potions you've encountered and what they do would be cool (though I know you can already just mouse over items to see what they do), and an option to disable text movement would be nice.
slime builds can be really overpowered if you get them to max level, especially with coolant slime and blueberry slime
I'm not saying this as a bad thing, it's fun to be overpowered, and the slimes show up infrequently enough that I don't think it's an issue at all, but I don't see many people talking about it, especially with hidd1212's list completely ignoring any slimes (though everything else there is pretty accurate and useful)
the biggest reason that blueberry and coolant slimes are so powerful is that they have a purely negative effect on their target when added, and a purely positive effect on their target when cast, so when you add them they always apply a negative effect to your opponent, and then if you overflow with them you apply the positive effect to yourself. Since the effect is pretty weak at low levels, I can understand people maybe not wanting to go for slime builds since they can be hard to get going, but they are definitely worth it. Almost all of my successful builds that I can think of have been at least partly slime-based
Do you have something that allows to support your work? I hope you continue the development of this game.. maybe even with some more steps on the transformations ?
Ah, if you wanna' support me, the best places to do so would be either via Ko-fi or Subscribestar
I absolutely do want to continue expanding upon this game. I've already got an update currently in the works, it's just been slow progress since I've had to balance it with working on Commissions and other such money-making endeavors
Great news that you want to implement and add content. it has a very nice mechanics that keeps you glued for hours. we look forward to your updates
Please continue working on Potions and Polycules!!! this game ROCKS
oh that's real bizarre, can you give me some system info?
this game is genuinely rubbish which sucks because the art and premise is great
I've started only 3 runs where I only have access to basic stuff that does nearly nothing but my opponent has something that stuffs mine with eggplants or milk and then I just can't do anything because I permanently have no space or my inventory is slowly overtaken by duplicating junk.
Seriously, the difference between good vials and bad vials is insane. If your opponent has something GOOD you just lose, it takes FOREVER to lose, and it hurts worse and worse the entire time.
The fact that this game is SO CLOSE to being great but manages to trip THIS HARD is painful. There needs to be counterplay in "card" games like these or else it just falls apart.
I had to check what's almost 400MB in this game (usually Godot games are sub-150MB). If you would remove the unused Craftpix and Noraneko assets, the size would improve drastically.
Otherwise... like 8+ hours in I feel like I had way too much fun playing this (besides some unwinnable situations). It would be nice to have more control over upgrades, like a limited reroll, and not being stuck with the last 3 potions on the shelf.
Trying to have a look at the files myself, how did you do it?
OK, I've played this game waaaay too much (repeatedly) in the last 90 days. My high score on the downloadable version is 77. Online it's 35.
Early game, I've found a lot of utility to rerolling potions in the first 2-3 witches before you've gotten a build together. Just skip all the lvl 1's and rush getting enough allure built up to smash through. For upgrades, it's best to focus on getting the accel potions up to at least lvl 3 (where 2 potions can run a pot) as soon as possible.
There's a little sequence break you can do when you hit the first Drain witch--if you've got strong/frequent enough Expansion elixirs, you can force a backfire ASAP and max out your first slotted potion--then if you rush a victory right after, you can dupe that maxed potion and trivialize the next few levels. That sequence break requires a lot of setup and is finicky.
Anyways here's my breakdown of potion values:
Allure: crucial in early game, weak in lategame. Gives a max of 16/slot.
Glamour: weak. Even a level 6 glamour gives only 6+5+4+3+2+1=21 total allure. Counting the cost of the accels needed to fulfill it, gives 1.3 allure per cast at level 5.
Carnal: painfully weak in early game, busted in lategame. The x3 scaling makes it quickly the most effective single potion, as long as you've got a quick acceleration build. Weak against drain builds.
Charm: requires a dedicated build to make it work. Can be ridiculously overpowered.
Acceleration: Basically worthless below 3. Sweet spot is 4. Crucial throughout game
Expansion: Excellent for forcing backfires. Can cause gamebreaks if you cram too many into your pot, especially when combined with mesmerize. Countered with Compression potion
Mesmerizing: Weak in early game, strong in mid- to late-game. Firing off a couple mesmer 5's can screw up the opponent's pot enough to allow you some freedom to play around.
Bulging: Excellent for causing enduring backfires, especially at higher levels.
Virile: Weird. It pairs well with Compression potion and it's strong against backfires, since it sends the eggplants to the opponent's side.
Sticky: Junk. Easily countered with acceleration potions. At high enough strengths, Sticky ends up creating background potion in the opponent's cauldron, which can be exploited by Rose slime
Corruption: Not particularly useful on its own, but a hard counter to mesmerizing and bulging
Miracle: Overpowered in early game, actively detrimental in late game.
Catalyst: I've never gotten this one to work, but some enemies have good cat builds, so it's clearly effective. I assume it's useful against Ice Slime enemies.
Compression: Quietly powerful. Weak counter against bulging and mesmerizing, strong counter against expansion and growth. Works best at higher levels, which makes this potion a mid- to late-game potion.
Growth: weak. It requires pairing with one of the retained item types (spirals/eggplants) because the growth gets canceled by a brew, unlike Expansion. It might make a decent addition to an end-game build.
Prophesy: Backfire counter. Weak on its own. Can dilute an opponent's inventory with weak Allure potions if you purposefully backfire yourself.
Cowbell: (still) deeply broken, especially with multiple. Simultaneously denies the opponent a chance to advance their build and fills their cauldron with milk. The only counter to cowbell is a hard-and-fast backfire strategy that gets the CB out of your opponent's pot before it can trigger.
Viscous: Could pair well with Rose slime. Not sure it's worth it.
My high score build was:
3x lvl 5 accel
3x lvl 5 carnal
3x lvl 5 mesmerize
2x lvl 5 expansion
4x lvl 1 corruption
2x lvl 5 compression
6x cowbell
The goal is to quickly hit the enemy with cowbells and mesmerize to whiff their build, then buildup some strong carnals to exhaust the increasingly unrealistic bars. I kept lowlevel corruptions and compressions to counteract any negatives that I get hit with. The build died against an enemy who quickly dropped some expands that caused me to backfire the cowbells and mesmerizes, and got stuck in a backfire loop on the spirals.
Cannot understate the smile this post put on my face - it means a lot seeing someone enjoy the game enough to have spent so much time with it and give such a detailed breakdown, and it's definitely useful feedback in terms of game balance.
Big props to your high score, that's quite the polycule, hehe
If you've got somewhere I can submit longer-form feedback (IE userstories, bug reports, balance analysis, etc.) I'd be more than happy to give you significantly more information. I dunno if you plan on taking this game anywhere further, but if you're willing to work on it, I'll give you all the fodder I can.
Yup, I've been in the process of working on an update for a couple months - although it's relatively slow going since I've gotta' balance working on the game with making money.
I'm considering setting up a discord where folks can report bugs, leave suggestions and all that jazz - but I'm still deciding if I want the extra responsibility that comes with all that.
Spirals and eggplants should disappear on overflow. You straight up can't win if the opponent casts a high potency mesmerizing / bulging elixir.
Other than that... I absolutely adore this! The witches are so cute, and mixing suika game with a Panel De Pon - type pvp system is very clever! The vibes are absolutely immaculate, and figuring out how to make a good build feels great! Just fix Mesmerizing and Bulging. They're crazy overpowered.
I don't know what the counter to the spiral witch is, I thought that if I made the brew go over the top the spirals would fall out, but they didn't, so any spirals she creates are really permanent, and you are immediately running against the clock and need to add a lot of alure to your bews only to barely have a positive net alure at the end. And there is basically no other way to beat her, other than of course making her bew go over the top, but it's actually quite hard to do that, I have never managed it.
Corruption elixir is the hard counter to spiral/eggplant: you can erase spirals by corrupting them.
thats assuming rng lets you get it in the first place
Great game concept, adding the ability to customize the looks of your witch would be a fantastic addition imo
Cant wait for the next update! keep up the good work
i think i broke the game. right after the opponent brew wouldn't stop doing bubbles
I'v been trying to play this but every time I try it crashes my laptop before I get past the engines loading screen.
does this count as beating the game? (it crashed) (also, idk why im bubbling, I had nothing on my side but sent a lot of stuff to their side)
Why does the opponent get access to an infinite combo of eggplant and spirals. They do not go away. I just keep getting backfired with no chance to fight back. I was winning and then my shit wouldn't stop overflowing with eggplants and spirals. Why are they persistent
Real decent premise, a good bit of fun for a short time, would be amazing if there were more mechanics and choices and progression similar to slay the spire
Really like this game, wish there was a way to look at my 'trophy case' of ensorcelled witches.
Even a splash screen between fights where you got to look at your conquests would be nice.
Game is amazing, i spent way to much time on it already xD
I love the concept of it but i really wish i could select my starting items, could be by unlocking new ones by playing or buying them in a shop or smthing similar ? Could add a small coins that you get after winning then you can buy the potions or items you want !! Otherwise the game is great, would definitely recommend ^w^
Amazing game. I would love to see different starting bags become available. I'm dead set on trying to make a more unique strategy work. Still, every time I try to go for anything that is too far from the basic allure potion plan, I lose too quickly before I even get any kind of new synergy between my potions going.
(A hopefully easy-to-implement idea for this could be to choose a starting bag from one of the witches you encounter.)
Got a bug to report, not sure if it's an issue on my end or maybe godot but I might as well
So, I decided to download the game both on the itch io app and using my browser, and both times after it got past the godot loading screen, all i would see is a nlack screen with little black squares that were blinking rapidly, there was noise but other than that I couldn't click anything or do anything, however for some reason i can play it on my browser so I'm not sure what's going on there.
I love this game. The witches are cute and the gameplay has me hooked!
My main complaint is that the game has a tendency to softlock, especially common when coolant or viscous is in play (things that change the cast time.) It can throw the game into a broken state where casting potions doesn't work and nobody can win or lose regardless of sub-zero allure.
There's also a bug with expansion elixir in tier 5/6. If ingredients grow too large, they can spill out of the pot into the other player's, even potentially cause the other player to overflow. Maybe there should be a maximum size for ingredients to grow to?
Also, even after the nerfs, bovine elixir is super oppressive. Maybe casting a bovine elixir could downgrade it once or remove it from the bag? Maybe corruption elixir could remove it from the bag after converting it?
Does or will this have sex scenes?
not currently
not opposed to the idea in future, but I don't really consider it a priority. my focus is on erotic stuff that coincides with the gameplay
Seems to be majorly unstable. I’ve only gotten it to run once. Every other time, the window either doesn’t appear at all, I get stuck on a solid grey screen with sound, it never goes past the Godot logo, or it crashes on the godot logo.
EDIT: So, I watched this in Process Monitor, and when it fails to load, it’s constantly opening “Potions and Polycules.pck”, reading 512 bytes at offset 202,237,062, 4,096 bytes at 384,490,080, 202,236,720, and 384,493,728, and closing it, followed by failed attempts to open \scripts\particles\bubble_particle.gdc.import, over and over again.
At one point, it also wrote a lot to the log file, which led to me check it, and I found it full of this error:
EDIT2: Ran it from the console with –verbose, and yeah, when it hangs, it’s constantly searching for that bubble_particle file.
Realistically, this means it probably shouldn’t have run that one time at all, so IDK.
EDIT3: Here’s the full log from that verbose run. https://0.0g.gg/?710cae9b593b66db#3AdRgwaWBqtoA6AB5op7eLvBCoATtaysa7K5zPDDii6f
hmm, interesting
I'm afraid this is one of those 'works on my machine' type problems that're tricky to track down, so thankyou very much for the detailed bug report
I'm currently working on an update that, among other things, ports the project to the latest stable Godot release which with any luck should improve stability - but I will investigate if there's anything funky going on with the bubble particle prefab.
It would be nice if you could customize the witch you play as instead of leaving it at random. Still, amazing game, been playing for hours and I can't stop!
Super addicted to what little I can manage to play. Even if it takes me 30mins to get a handful in the polycule, I can't stop going back to try again! Sadly 70% of my runs end thanks to a crash.
I particularly enjoyed the 'send to opponent' type effects. I'm a little iffy on the slime ones as they merge very easily and they don't tend to have any effect at the 6* potency since...they're supposed to take up cauldron space not sit in the infinite liquid state! Would recommend that they 'revert' to solid on cast, so that they go back into the cauldron instead of disappearing. At least for the ones that are meant to be thrown at the opponent. Would be a great way to make use of the opponent's liquid mechanic if you filled it up and the moment they cast they're hit with a wall of slime! Maybe a slime that cleans the opponent's slime on infusion but deals allure based on their slime potency at cast.
edit:Wow this ended up as a wall of text and a half! TLDR; Lots of troubleshooting to find out my pc is officially potato and to fix that would require gambling on bsod, and that's just to fix whatever the debugger wants not what the game demands.
I can only guess that my gpu is barely strong enough to play the game but only marginally and any performance humps means a crash. So essentially, I can only ask for better optimization if I want to actually play.
I found out exactly how outdated my pc is because of this game haha! All the debugging told me that I really really needed to update my graphics driver...only it took me a couple days of troubleshooting to find out that my pc has a manufacturer lock on it's drivers and they stopped supporting my pc years before even intel stopped as well. I found out I can 'unlock' it by reverting first and then using external programs/tools and make it update towards intel's drivers(which has a community that recently put out a new update), but that comes with the bsod risks, don't know if this game is worth bricking my computer...it's real close though~~! I also think the error code is the debugger failing and not what actually crashed the game since it won't stop trying to access debug files for drivers that don't want to be debugged and the community is only as helpful as 'ignore that as the developer'. It wasn't a waste of time though, I at least found some updates for other drivers that couldn't be found automatically by windows. In the process of all that I found out my calculator was corrupted...somehow, and it was the pebble in the cog stopping the 'final' windows update from going through, that took a full day of troubleshooting to fix. Managed to update everything as much as possible and cleaned up tons of clutter. So yay for a slightly faster pc experience...even if it had zero impact on my gaming experience. I can now use my browser at normal speeds even under slightly above average throughput!
The problems I'm facing thus can't rely on the debug logs, and I'll just do it old school via guestimation!
During launch is most likely the more common performance issues. It's just my pc has potato gpu so frame drops during preloading become game breaking instead. Pretty sure what's crashing me on launch is the wavy texture plus the front heavy loading. When the wavy font moves around by going through the different menus it does a decent sized frame stutter. I can see it being a draw on the system through the tutorial with it's moving boxes of texts.
Then what crashes mid game seems to be a combination of different entity updates like honey blocks detecting if it hit another honey block but it'll crash if it checks at the wrong time. Game also really hates when I hold a potion whilst the opponent is casting, or hover descriptions, or hover over refresh. This one's usually ok early on but the more potions out the worse it becomes, and especially so the bigger the polycule count as if the cache is being filled with prior rounds. Maybe some potions or sprite transformations data aren't being erased?
I've found the honey block and sprials to be particularly heavy on my pc. There's also the milk transformation, but that depends on the sprite being effected for some reason. Some sprites really don't like the milk, like instant crash even on the first step of milkers. On that note some sprites improve my performance quite a bit so sometimes I reroll just for my witch to be one of them. Weirdly they can tank the effects well enough that would slow or even crash other ones.
huge respect for your troubleshooting skills 🙏
I'll see if I can use some of this information to optomise the game a lil further, but I won't lie - I don't really know how much of this I really have the power to fix
The troubleshooting was mostly just sifting through useless guides/Q&As. Also because every source on my pc's spec was vague about the graphics name/spec/gen, I still don't actually know since it's 1 of 3 very different ones and I just used the archived manufacturer files that encompassed the whole pc build. Though thank the heavens for some random guy who gave succinct cmd prompt lines which fixed dism/cbs before attempting to fix the pc.
The launch bug...not much since that's just potato intel graphics, but maybe add a persistent and more thorough settings menu. The game always opens at max resolution, and it'd be nice to be able to tone down the particle effects and animations like bubbles, spirals, and such. The reduced particle effect could just be a singular bubble that expands briefly before popping, lots of entities spawning and erasing is a breeding ground for some to become permanent if the process gets interrupted. The wavy text is probably the easiest to turn off, which I'm sure is why hover descriptions add so much strain. Don't know why hovering on the refresh does, maybe because of the little animation it does? Holding potions is more a physics problem which is...a huge ask to optimize to say it lightly! A more specific ask would be a 'clear effects' button in the pause menu, since sometimes a transformation is applied poorly and the game really struggles from after that. Which gets cleaned a bit after clearing the level, but there's a subtle change in the minimum strain from then on. The spirals only really become a problem because...they're kind of op and you're more likely to have at least half your pot filled with a dozen or more of them before you clear the level. So the shear quantity of spirals become a problem when they all individually spin.
Another optimization is to put all the transformations into a buffer zone. Like a 'combo' counter or something where it'll hold all the effects until after the potions settle down, then applies it either sequentially or at once depending on how the coding handles transformation. Though if you go that route, you'd also have to include an after battle break so that we can actually admire the sprite's transformations since it currently skips straight to the 'shop' menu upon winning. The shop is also a great point in time to clear up the cache a bit and should overall keep the performance in peak condition throughout a run. Stuff like double checking if all the potions and transformation have been cleared, as well as freeing up prior sprites from remaining cached since it'd be rare to get identical sprites. It'll add a loading time, but it'd also speed up the game.
I'm also going out on a limb and guessing that the honey block has extra/redundant checks since the other slime blocks don't crash my game. Honey will crash my game if it collides with something at heavy strain moments, even if it's not the honey block being dropped in. Probably not much of a difference for others, but when you're already throttling the line even slight spikes become more obvious.
I've been really enjoying this! Now I just need to get good enough to actually play with all the potion types :p
Excellent work!
I really enjoyed the game, thank you for making it! I really liked looking at the various TFs and their progression.
I also like how there's a bit of real-time elements, so you can do things like try to save your pot from backfiring by causing it to brew first, or save yourself from hitting 0 allure by brewing something while the allure is ticking down.
I seem to have found a good strategy for winning fights:
--------------------
As fast as you can, put 3-4 Lv5 Expansion potions and then Brew the pot, using rerolls as necessary to force the ingredients to show up. Ideally you'd splash 1-2 eggplant or Hypno potions in there as well to force a backfire, but they aren't completely necessary.
After brewing the other side's pot's ingredients should expand and cause a backfire. From then on you keep piling on expansion to maintain the large ingredient size while doing other stuff and then win since you're doing stuff and they are not.