Spirit Tea - Devlog #2

Ideas have been spilling out of me like an overfilled teapot so I just had to get some stuff down last night.

While Apothecaria is firmly rooted in magical healthcare, Spirit Tea customers can be more varied in their requests. Anything from needing help finding a lost item to wanting a spirit to bless their child to giving them courage, strength, guidnce, or answers. Each tier of Requests requires you to seek out increasingly powerful spirits as your customers start to ask for things like immortality or to see the future or to protect their village from a natural disaster.

To keep with this growing magicalness of the Requests, I like the idea of having 4 mortal Locales to Forage in and having 4 magical Locales that you unlock as you play.

So while you might spend the start of the game calling forth the spirits of rivers and trees, minor deities and ancestors, you will eventually be able to call forth the dragons, immortals, spirits of oceans, stars, and more.

This stage of development is all about getting the ideas down on paper before I start to forget things.

It's also the really fun stage where I get to try out ideas like having a section on Lion Dancing that your character can do at festivals to earn money or including a table of personalities for your mentor or having some character creation prompts.

Art wise, I'm going for a sumi-e/ ink painting / watercolour look. Hopefully I'll be able to find a commissionable artist to depict some spirits in that style! Thankfully there is a tonne of stock art out there for things like flowers, bamboo, landscapes, tea pots, and brush strokes that I can use to pretty up the book.

Recently I've been shopping at an asian food market in town and it's been awesome. The lady that runs the store has been so helpful and put us onto laoganma chilli oil and we've had it nearly every night for the past 2 months.

We also found an interesting Citron Tea that has a texture and flavour similar to marmalade and can be used as a spread but is marketed as a tea. And I'm really happy to see that the definition of tea is so wide reaching as it gives me so many more options for Ingredients in the game!

So until the next update, let me know in the comments; what's your favourite tea? What's the most unusual tea you've had?

Thanks again for reading!