Oh hey there, welcome! So sorry to bother ya, but would ya mind takin’ a quick gander at The Alchemist’s Handbook, eh?
You’ll be battlin’ baddies by mixin’ and matchin’ your attacks and tryin’ to figure out their elemental weaknesses, if it’s not too much trouble. Grow your lil' pile of attack cards and upgrade 'em so you can brave the real tough cookies later on! Hope that’s alright!
The Alchemist’s Handbook is my fourth game jam game - can you believe it? As usual, it all went down in the lovely city of Hanover, hosted at the good ol’ SAE Institute (really a beauty of a place). This time, Theia was kind enough to join in again, and I also had the pleasure of working with some absolute gems from past jams.
Hai Lam brought her fantastic art chops again - honestly, bless her heart, she’s so talented it’s almost unfair. Luke helped out with Unity again too (thanks a bunch, bud!), and another very kind artist who goes by Koa’Rynn joined in as well, which really gave our visuals a good ol’ boost, ya know?
Jonas was all set to lend a hand with the music again, but oh no - poor guy hurt his hand on day one, can you believe that? We felt just awful. So the game ended up without music or sound effects, sorry aboot that! We just didn’t feel right grabbing someone else’s work off the internet, ya know?
In the end, we still managed to whip up a pretty fun lil’ game - even if, sorry to say, the balance is kinda off and it’s a real challenge just to get to the final stage. Poor Hai Lam spent hours on a gorgeous dragon illustration that almost no one’s gonna see. We're terribly sorry aboot that!
Idea
So, the theme this time was “Curiosity,” which got a lot of folks thinking aboot cats (you know, “curiosity killed the cat”, classic), and a couple teams even did Mars rover stuff. But I was feelin’ more into the whole discovery vibe, eh?
I’d been itchin’ to try out an RPG battle system, so we figured, let’s go full Dungeon Crawler with a Darkest Dungeon-style card combat twist. Seemed like a beauty of an idea at the time!
Here’s how we politely packed the “curiosity” into our game:
- You’ve got to poke around and figure out enemy weaknesses (sorry they’re not marked more clearly!),
- You can explore cool combos between different cards,
- And you’re playin’ as this curious alchemist fella, diving deeper and deeper into the dungeon because, well, they just can't help themselves, eh?
Combat
I gotta say, I’m kinda proud of how the combat turned out - even if it’s a bit basic. Sorry, but we could only get one enemy to show up at a time. If I’d tried more, it would've made things more complicated than a moose in a canoe, so we kept it simple.
So you’ll be fightin’ in four stages:
Goblin → Skeleton → Elemental Mage → Elemental Dragon
Hope that’s not too linear, but it seemed polite to keep things organized, ya know?
Elemental Attacks
Now here’s where it gets spicy - and I mean maple-syrup spicy, not jalapeño. There are six damage types: physical ones (Slash, Stab, Bash) and elemental ones (Fire, Ice, and good ol’ Volt). You might recognize these from Persona or Etrian Odyssey, which honestly inspired the heck outta me.
You start off with three random attack cards, and when you beat an enemy (hopefully without too much fuss), you get to pick a new card from a set of three. If it’s a new one, beauty - welcome to the team! If you already have it, well then it levels up and does more damage, so that’s nice, eh?
You can either spread out and try to cover all your bases or go all-in on one type and pray the enemies don’t resist it too hard. Sorry if the random draw gets you in a pickle - we tried our best, honest!
And to keep things from getting stale, you use two cards together for extra fun. Like, freeze an enemy and then bash ’em real good? That’s a proper Canadian combo right there. There are six special combos total, so poke around, eh?
Oh, and on the final day (bit last-minute, sorry!), we added status effects:
- Fire can burn and drop attack power, sorry aboot the singes.
- Ice can freeze and make baddies more vulnerable - beauty!
- Volt might paralyze and cause a turn skip - but it’s kinda buggy, eh? Real sorry aboot that one.
Accessibility
Now this part’s near and dear to my heart, folks.
When I made Flower Defense, it was a downloadable Windows .exe and you needed a controller - oh gosh, what a hassle. Downloading, installing, connecting cables… who has time for that, eh?
Then with Murder at the Great Exhibition and Daydreamer, I moved to web games - no downloads, yay! But keyboard-only controls made ‘em tough on phones. Sorry aboot that.
For The Alchemist’s Handbook, I wanted to make it easy as poutine on a paper plate: pure mouse controls, eh? That way, you can play it on your phone with just a couple taps. Unity treats taps as clicks, so it worked out pretty great! Hopefully that makes up for earlier, less accessible games - terribly sorry if it doesn’t!
Lessons Learned
Oh boy, I sure learned a bunch this time ‘round. Hope you don’t mind me rambling on here!
I learned a lot about animating attacks - which turned out to be more fiddly than a beaver building a dam backwards. We used an event-driven combat engine at first, super fast and efficient, but then had to slow it all down to add animations on day two. Tricky stuff!
Hai Lam showed me DOTween - it’s a beaut of a plugin for UI animations. I used that while Luke worked on character animations.
But oh no, our elemental animations caused no end of trouble. They shot lil' fireballs and whatnot across the screen, but if something glitched (which it did, more than once - sorry!), the whole game could soft-lock. Super sorry if that happens to you!
Next time, I’m thinkin’ of building a proper animation handler that just moves along politely once things are done, or if not, after a wee timeout. Gotta have a plan B, eh?
Oh, and I’m also real sorry we didn’t spend more time tuning the difficulty. As it stands, it’s kinda rough and most folks won’t even see the later enemies - which is a darn shame considering all the work Hai Lam put into the mage and dragon. We’ll do better next time, promise!
Final Thoughts
We might not have nailed the theme of curiosity like a curling stone on the button, but I’m still pretty chuffed with how it all turned out.
Coding the combat was heckin’ fun, and DOTween made the UI real slick - bless its heart. This might be my last jam for a while (gotta rest the ol’ brain, ya know?), but I hope you give The Alchemist’s Handbook a try, and have a real good time with it.
Thanks a ton for reading - and sorry if I went on too long, eh?