RefresherTowel
Member
The Steam Demo
Well, I did it. Or should I say, we did it! Because without the help of this community I definitely wouldn't have been able to get the game into a state where I could put the demo up on Steam in time! It's been a long couple of weeks, with many sleepless nights and an insane amount of crunch, but the demo is now up on Steam. Add it to your library and give the game a wishlist if you want! I'll be adding content to it over the next week or so, primarily focused around more spellboosts and a few extra levels. Enjoy!
Trailer (I need to re-record it because this one is low bitrate, but oh well, it will do for now)
Here's some modern screenshots:
Rundown
Alchementalist is a procedurally generated roguelike dungeon crawler. At the start of each run, you have access to some fairly standard spells, relating to the four elements fire, water, wind, and earth. As you delve deeper into the dungeon you'll encounter various ores (which also coincide with the four elements). These ores can be mined by attacking them with your spells allowing you to gather materials from them. Enemies also have a chance of dropping enemy-specific materials. These materials can be used to craft upgrades for your spells (and occasionally your person) or even to craft totally new wands.
There's a large variety of enemies to fight your way through and they have powers that, if not the same as yours, are at least equal, which means you can combine your spells elemental effect with that of the enemies for emergent chaos in the heat of battle.
Alchementalogs
- Paying Attention to Detail
- A Song of Stats and Boosts (Part 1)
- A Song of Stats and Boosts (Part 2)
- Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
- Delving the Deeps (Part 1)
- The Essence of Flavour (Part 2)
- Fixer Upper
- Burying Treasure and Stopping Draughts
- Mining for Content
- Do It Again, But This Time In 3D
Story
Hidden deep within the secret lore of the wise, lie tales of an ancient order of mages. Theirs was a life lived in the depths of the earth and they delved vast subterranean cities, plumbing the ancient rock for the magical elements that were formed from the bones of the world. One element they prized above all others. They called it the Ember-source and they craved and treasured it, for it was both beautiful and powerful.
It was from this desired element that the name of their order came to be: Ember-mages. No one living knows why or how they vanished from this world, but vanish they did, and today their magnificent caverns lie in ruins, with only death and danger inhabiting them. Magical experiments and powerful abominations guard their secrets from those who dwell above. However, their tales and the seeds of truth that may be contained within have always attracted the brave and the foolhardy. You consider yourself both, and you have vowed to find the truth behind the veil of legend. The journey will be long and black and many dangers await. But, perhaps, at the end of the descent, when you have passed through much toil and weariness, lies a treasure beyond reckoning.
The Ember-source beckons, Alchementalist.
WIP Screenshots
Testing the dash wind spell
Getting attacked by Ice Hoppers and testing out fire's ability to destroy ice patches
Testing out the shockwave fire spell
Very earlier proof of concept test with fire spreading
The Demo is here (Or, as I'm calling it, the "beta" of the demo)!
Ok, I'm at the tail end of a literal 26 hour coding crunch to get this demo done, so I'm a little bit loopy right now, but here's the demo. I'd like to add a few notes though.
Firstly, I'm releasing this to the GMC community as a testing ground before it goes on Steam. So it's still got jagged edges that I need to smooth out! I'm relying on you folks to be the sand-paper, hahaha. Please let me know if it crashes and what you were doing at the time (especially helpful is a copy+paste of the error message!). So let's talk about what's working and what's not.
I've had a lot of technical debt slowly creeping up on me for awhile now, and I recently spent a good portion of time smoothing that out, however that broke most of the spellboosts that were craftable (I think there were about 30 or 40 working at one point). The ones that work right now (or at least, I believe they work) are the Bigger, Horizon, and Elemental Movement and Elemental End spellboosts. Any other spellboosts you craft at your own risk as they most likely will crash the game, lol. I think all the wands added so far are craftable without crashes though! I'll be steadily adding spellboosts over the next few days and since Alchementalist is a perma-death roguelike, you don't need to wait for them, since you're not losing out on progress by playing now or anything like that.
Also, while the released game will be procedurally generated, the demo is not. I had to pick my battles to get the demo ready and the proc-gen dungeons just need more time in the cooker than I had. The enemy AI is dodgy-ish. They occasionally enter their idle state and can't be woken up, lol. I'm still trying to track down why that is. But in any case, I believe the game is kinda hard, so consider it a little blessing. If you find cheese strats that make the enemies a breeze, let me know! Especially in the second level, as I have made the first level relatively easy, but I ramped up the difficulty in the second. Speaking of levels, there are only two right now, but if I did my job right, it'll still be pretty hard to beat the game. Post a screenshot if you manage to get to the end, as I'd love to have a rough gauge of the completion rate.
There's a lot of stuff waiting in the backgrounds of the game, systems that are 90% working but aren't quite ready for release that I had to disable, and other stuff like that. Meta-progression, bestiary, etc. A lot of stuff that I really hope manages to make it's way into the full release.
All that being said (and if you've managed to keep reading so far!), I'm super happy that I get to release the demo to this community first, as I get a lot of inspiration and encouragement here. Despite the above paragraphs, I am very proud of the game and I do absolutely think it's worth giving a play, I just wanted to temper expectations a little. I've poured my heart and soul into the dev of this game, and I've tried to craft as fun an experience as I can! I really hope those of you who play it enjoy it, and if you don't, let me know why! Any and all feedback helps me craft a better game.
Known Bugs
Ok, I'm at the tail end of a literal 26 hour coding crunch to get this demo done, so I'm a little bit loopy right now, but here's the demo. I'd like to add a few notes though.
Firstly, I'm releasing this to the GMC community as a testing ground before it goes on Steam. So it's still got jagged edges that I need to smooth out! I'm relying on you folks to be the sand-paper, hahaha. Please let me know if it crashes and what you were doing at the time (especially helpful is a copy+paste of the error message!). So let's talk about what's working and what's not.
I've had a lot of technical debt slowly creeping up on me for awhile now, and I recently spent a good portion of time smoothing that out, however that broke most of the spellboosts that were craftable (I think there were about 30 or 40 working at one point). The ones that work right now (or at least, I believe they work) are the Bigger, Horizon, and Elemental Movement and Elemental End spellboosts. Any other spellboosts you craft at your own risk as they most likely will crash the game, lol. I think all the wands added so far are craftable without crashes though! I'll be steadily adding spellboosts over the next few days and since Alchementalist is a perma-death roguelike, you don't need to wait for them, since you're not losing out on progress by playing now or anything like that.
Also, while the released game will be procedurally generated, the demo is not. I had to pick my battles to get the demo ready and the proc-gen dungeons just need more time in the cooker than I had. The enemy AI is dodgy-ish. They occasionally enter their idle state and can't be woken up, lol. I'm still trying to track down why that is. But in any case, I believe the game is kinda hard, so consider it a little blessing. If you find cheese strats that make the enemies a breeze, let me know! Especially in the second level, as I have made the first level relatively easy, but I ramped up the difficulty in the second. Speaking of levels, there are only two right now, but if I did my job right, it'll still be pretty hard to beat the game. Post a screenshot if you manage to get to the end, as I'd love to have a rough gauge of the completion rate.
There's a lot of stuff waiting in the backgrounds of the game, systems that are 90% working but aren't quite ready for release that I had to disable, and other stuff like that. Meta-progression, bestiary, etc. A lot of stuff that I really hope manages to make it's way into the full release.
All that being said (and if you've managed to keep reading so far!), I'm super happy that I get to release the demo to this community first, as I get a lot of inspiration and encouragement here. Despite the above paragraphs, I am very proud of the game and I do absolutely think it's worth giving a play, I just wanted to temper expectations a little. I've poured my heart and soul into the dev of this game, and I've tried to craft as fun an experience as I can! I really hope those of you who play it enjoy it, and if you don't, let me know why! Any and all feedback helps me craft a better game.
Known Bugs
- ESCAPE QUITS THE GAME. Ok this isn't a bug, but I had no idea it would lead to the gnashing of teeth it has. I'll try to get a proper menu system setup ASAP so that you don't just get dumped at title from a single button press! In the meantime, I have changed it so that if you press escape while the inventory/crafting windows are open, it will simply close them, rather than end the run. IT STILL ENDS THE RUN if you press escape without the inventory open.
- Non 16:9 resolutions seem to be a bit borked.
- Particle system errors if the game is forced to shutdown by windows (I've encountered a lot of weird particle system problems and I think there might be an issue in GM after their implementation of the in-editor particle system stuff, but I'll definitely keep testing and working on it to see if I can find a cause that belongs to my own idiocy).
- POSSIBLY FIXED: Upon booting the game, there's the chance of everything being black, with just the text options displaying. This is basically a soft-lock. I've been trying to crack this nut for awhile and still haven't found the cause. I think it's related to being alt-tabbed out of the game while it's booting and that messing with the GUI and application surface size, but I haven't been able to trigger it consistently enough to be able to properly lock it down.
- FIXED:
Enemies occasionally get borked and aggro at the player when they shouldn't. I think it has to do with them taking damage from other enemies, but I haven't pinpointed the exact cause yet. - FIXED: This should be fixed now.
Spells are being incorrectly destroyed when hitting non-interacting breakable objects, which causes some weirdness (such as leaving a light behind and not playing correct spell destruction SFX + particles). - FIXED: I believe that I have fixed the inventory/crafting system. I spent awhile testing it, swapping back and forth between crafting and wand editor, crafting elements, applying them to the wand, swapping wands in and out, and I didn't manage to trigger a crash.
Crafting is currently borked in multiple ways. I'm working on fixing that as I type. - FIXED:
A bug in the Inventory system which prevented the player from moving when the Inventory was closed. I don't know if this was consistent for everyone, or just an unlucky circumstance for an individual player, I'm also unsure as to whether it was specifically related to pressing "i" to close the inventory, or whether it happened through both pressing escape and pressing "i". Right now, I've fixed it by basically just ignoring the fact that the inventory is open, which allows you to move and shoot when using the inventory, but that's the lesser of two evils between the game being soft-locked simply from using the inventory. - FIXED: I think I've nailed this one down. If I'm correct in thinking I fixed it, it had to do with a specific frame of animation being interrupted by the players spell staggering them, which desynced the animation and ai state machines. I've added in an additional check and I haven't managed to get them to bork yet, so I'm hoping it's fixed.
Enemies can get frozen in idle state and won't attack the player. This happens semi-frequently and I'm trying to find the cause. I've been at this one for awhile, so not sure exactly when I'll manage to hunt down the cause and fix it. - FIXED:
There is currently a bug where if you start a new game after playing a previous game without totally exiting the game (i.e. after death, or by pressing escape to go to the main menu and starting a new game), the player gets soft-locked in the starting room because collisions between spells and the switch no longer work. I'm aware of what's causing this and I'm fixing it as we speak. - FIXED:
There was a crash related to the enemy taking damage that happened infrequently in the previous version. I think I have fixed it in the currently uploaded version, but I'd need more people playing to make sure. - FIXED:
There were minor graphical and gameplay problems, such as rocks not being solid and appearing on top of you as you ran through them, and switches not "lighting up" properly which made them a bit hard to "read". I'm still wanting to make all the interactables more obvious than they currently are (i.e. chests, barrels and switches), and I'm considering solutions as to how to go about that. I also want to make enemies more easily readable, and am considering ways to go about doing that as well.
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