Another potion brewing game! Honestly glad I wasn't the only one lol. We actually had a lot of similar thoughts.
So I have some thoughts that are somewhat influenced by the fact that we both went similar directions in a lot of ways, so hopefully this helps you flesh this out further if that's what you're looking to do.
- I was honestly confused a lot of the time. I struggled to convey what makes a correct recipe myself so I understand how difficult it is. I don't have a very clear end-goal that makes sense aside from seeing the progress bar go one way or another, but how I got there was unclear. Even just adding some additional tutorial text to your page would help users who are testing your game.
- There's some buggyness you're probably already aware of. I couldn't get the potion list to open when I wanted it to, tooltip text would be stuck on screen and make some of the item names I'm hovering on innacurate, etc.
- I like the idea that potions are lost to time and you need to piece together what is missing. Maybe this could be further influenced by giving the player more information on what is included and why it works. In my game, there are 5 different potion types and ingredients have flavor text hints to tell you which they would be suited for (poppy flowers for sleep potions, etc.) If I had a better idea of what kind of potion I'm trying to make, the puzzle would feel less like blind luck.
- Some additional thoughts: > - The meter on the cauldron made me think it was a temperature gauge. It would be cool to have to control the heat for the potion as well > - You have a good start to the graphics here, I think it would benefit immensely from some animations as the potion becomes progressively better/worse > - A button to dump out the potion and start again could be helpful (I should probably consider the same for mine lol)
Hope this helps! I think this is a strong effort that could be made better with some polish and additional playtesting.
Edit to add: I played the HTML5 version. I know bugs can be platform specific so I wanted to be sure I included that info.