It sounds like a lot of fun! Can’t wait to see it. Hope you all are feeling better soon 
What percentage of the population is vaping now? Does anyone know the answer? I think that will tell you what your audience could be. (Your market)
I’m assuming the profit potential would be in the ads you sell, right?
According to a brief Google search, it looks like somewhere between 10-12% of US population are vapors. So that’s a fairly sizable segment of the population. If I try to make any money off this, it would likely be through in app purchases, as i find those ads that pop up in the middle of a game or during a level transition to be annoying as hell.
To be honest, I’m not exploring this to make money (Although I obviously wouldn’t say no to a revenue stream from it), I view it as a challenge and something that looks fun to do, and hopefully it’s something the community at large could have fun killing time with.
On a different track, does anyone here have in skill in graphics? I’d love to put in some rich graphical backdrops in the game, but I have zero skill at drawing, just something i never could do. I’ve found some stock images on the web, but none of them really have the look I’m going for. If someone here has that skill and would like credit it’d be cool.
Also, does anyone mind if I base some of the recipes in the game of recipes here? Obviously it wouldn’t include precise measurements or anything like that (It is a game after all!), just a basis for what ingredients to grab. Of course this would also be credited, something along the lines of the customer saying “I’d like a bottle of Phager’s Strawberry Lemonade”, and then the player would have to grab 10 pg 1 vg 1 Pink Lemonade and 2 Strawberries.
Thinking legalities I’m wondering if it’s safer to do these no nic? And should it have an age rating? Wouldn’t want the FDA thinking I’m trying to corrupt minors, after all! 
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Well Dear, I don’t think anyone on this site would deny you the right to make money! We all have to make money. Also… we have a lot of computer peeps here…
I agree on the age rating thing too.
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A) I love games and more power to ya for wanting to do this. I wish I could do mobile but I’m not there yet. LoL.
B) I’m not sure with the regs if/how it will go for it to get published to app stores. You might wind up with the FDA breathing down your neck saying you’re “advertising” vaping so I’d look into that.
C) Did you ever play the second (I think?) installment of virtual villagers? They had a little mini quest where you had to pick herbs and try putting them in the pot in different orders to “discover” different magics. Something like that as a mini game might be cool. You have a set of flavors and if you put them together in a certain way you get an award for making certain recipes. Like say you put together hazelnut, butter pecan, bavarian cream, and sweet cream you get the “Bust a Nut” award ( 
@Alisa). Maybe you get rewarded with more bucks for flavors or supplies or what have you. Heck, if you got thumbs up from creators, you might could even pop up a little sparkly “recipe card” with the actual recipe. Or sumfin or some such. Thoughts and things. 
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My kids got me to play Skyrim. In there you have to eat a mystery ingredient to discover it’s properties before you can make any potions with it. You can easily poison yourself by tasting too many things at once, lol.
Maybe disguise the object of the game to be not vaping but making potions? That’s basically what we’re doing. When it starts out tasting like chapstick and a month later it’s a glorious confection, that’s magical, right?
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Now there’s an thought! I really like the potion idea. How about this for a game title @JoJo and @daath “The ELR Alchemist”? What can I say, I’d love to give a shout out to the brain trust here that’s pushing me along in this game. This way we mixers know what the real basis of the game is, but it also gives it a wider audience for the game. Might even be viewed as educational since it teaches following a recipe which, if you look at my wife’s cooking, is an underutilized tool (Kidding, kidding!)!
I’m thinking of working up an alpha version with just the menu interface this week, that should help lock in protection for my IP if I slap a copyright logo on it.
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That sounds like fun - I think it could even be a fun VR game for the Vive and/or the Rift 
Alright boys and girls, I’ve made some progress on the menu system for the game. It’s still very much in the alpha phase (Is there anything earlier the alpha? Maybe WTF was I thinking phase?).
But, before I get to far ahead of my self, I absolutely have to give the biggest shout out known to man to out very own @CosmicTruth. As we all know a game is no better then the images and graphics it portrays, and our resident alien graciously offered to donate his time and effort in to creating the graphics for this game. Seriously Cosmic, I have no way to adequately convey how much I appreciate the work you’re putting in to help me out with this little pet project of ours. You truly are a legendary person and i thank you from the bottom of my heart!
On to where the game stands. Like I said, i wanted to get some sort of place holder with my copyright on it to protect the concept. Now this version is buggy as hell, I still need to get the buttons on the new game/task assignment screen to work, as well as take care of some legacy labels on the buttons to navigate the menu.
The course I’m taking on Unity will have me making a block breaker style game next, so I’m hoping to gain some understanding on creating movement and physics using unity and C# so we may actually be able to have some real gameplay elements functioning in the game in the coming weeks.
So without further ado, I present The E.L.R. Apprentice version 0.01Alpha:
http://hagerweb.com/elra_alpha/
So poke around, be brutally honest and tell me what you’d like to see next, and what needs to change!
By the way, if you click on new game, you won’t be able to navigate out, so you’ll have to refresh the browser to see more of the game.
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I’m just getting a grey box - is it because I’m on Ipad do you think?
I bet so, it’s designed for Windowzzz. But in time he will make the game available to all the different computers that have ever been made :)…
now everyone (almost) sees the game I bet other ppl will have better looking graphics!
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Then I shall try it on Windows when I get home 
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I’m getting the same grey box on Windows comp.
Edit: scratch that…just took a while to load the main screen
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Very likely. One of the limitations of the WebGL ports is a lack of compatibility with mobile devices. As the game progresses, I’ll be implementing ports to both Android and iOS, but I’m almost certain that there will be code changes for those ports (Since they prefer Java and Swift, respectively), so that left me with the option of a Web based game or executable files. Web seemed to give a wider opportunity for others to play it.
Not quite, designed under Winblows. But I agree completely with the sentiment! I really wish that Unity was made to run under Linux, since that’s been my preferred OS since the 486 days (Yes I’m that old! my first PC based computer was an 8088!). I’ve found that the Untiy IDE is so slow on my computer, whereas the IDEs I run on my Linux mint laptop, using older technology, runs lightening quick.
Yep, and there’s the other limitation with WebGL, it loads incredibly slow. It’s all ported from C# to C++ and then to JavaScript (Unity does this automatically, I’m not that good of a programmer!), which leads to some code bloat. Since it is JS it all has to be ran locally on the clients machine, those two factors, combined, lead to slow loading times, even on broadband connections.
The background images are also rather large file sizes, so that also slows down the load speed. In the future I’m going to see how much I can increase the compression on the JPEGs to increase load speed, making sure I don’t compromise the quality appreciably.
I’ll try to get a more polished version up later this week (With all buttons functioning, even! 
)
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Version 0.02Alpha is live on the site now. Thanks to @CosmicTruth new buttons have been added and file sizes on the background images were reduced. Hopefully this speeds download times up.
Still can’t get those dang buttons on new game to work. I’ll have to poke around when I have more time!
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Got to this screen, but it didn’t do anything after that:
Yeah, it’s a known bug. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the buttons on the new game screen are not working. I hoping to spend some quality time with it either tomorrow or Tuesday and try and get them working. Time is one thing I’m horribly short on between my full time retail job, my contract IT job (Here’s hoping it goes to full time soon) and studying web design/back-end programming for the IT work, and Unity for fun, I’m not entirely sure how I fitting it all in! So development on this will probably go it spurts.
In order to get out of the screen, just refresh the browser (F5 on a PC) and it’ll reload the game.
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OK, this isn’t game related, but @CosmicTruth is seriously the coolest dude from another planet. He just hooked me up with a logo, and I just intrgated it in to the website. We went with a space motif, since I’m a huge sci-fi and space exploration fan (Still pissed that I didn’t make it to the Air and Space Museum on my recent trip to DC), and he rocked it like no other!
Check it out @ http://www.hagerweb.com
Thank you again Cosmic!
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I don’t see it yet, dont forget to upload the new page to the server
I found it had to click the web design link http://www.hagerweb.com/index.html
and your welcome
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Try doing a hard refresh (Shift F5 on PC) it might be a cache issue. I uploaded it before I posted as well as the rewritten css(almost forgot to do that!) and and all the other pages that shared that. I really need to change all of that to PHP to streamline the updating process.
Now the really strange thing, is when I go to hagerweb.com it came up perfect, but when I clicked the link above (with www on it) I got the full size logo with the old green background. I did a hard refresh and it showed the new navigation header. 