BattleJuice Alchemist News

Hey folks,

this week I'd like to take you on a deep dive of how Patrick and I created a new enemy for BattleJuice Alchemist. Although I enjoyed being a solo dev a lot, I love working collaboratively like this. But this brings the challenge to establish pipelines and workflows as a team, where ideally everybody does what they are best at. So let me tell you how this little raven fella came into existence!



Patrick is an illustrator and animator by trade and has been helping me out for years before joining on a permanent basis now. He helped ironing out our art bible, so I did not need to explain to him any details of our guidelines and what we go for thematically and visually. I thought it best to make the skeleton and animations for our new winged enemy type myself, because Patrick does not work with them inside Unreal like I do. I wanted to get this done quickly without a lot of tinkering, so I asked Patrick to make a concept for our general bird skeleton. He came up with this within a few hours:



You can't imagine how much time this saved me. I am not good at visualizing concepts so I usually go into 3D right away and this sometimes turns out to not be very time efficient. But with Patrick's concept, I was able to create our bird skeleton really quick.



I then made the animations while Patrick started making the 3D model for the raven. As you can see, the bones in the skeleton are not bones as you would usually shape them for a flying creature: You would usually only make the bones of the wings, not the wing itself (a bit like Patrick illustrated them in green in his concept). I shaped the bones like full wings to be able to see how they overlap due to our segmented style.



In BattleJuice Alchemist we do not skin our characters, we segment them into individual pieces. This is not just an economic decision, but also because we are nostalgic for this art style. I asked Patrick if he wanted to say something about this...

"I’m a big fan of highly stylized game looks. Also working with segmented low poly characters, hand-drawn textures and cel shading creates unique design challenges.

For instance, imagine you’re trying to draw a classic cartoon chracter but it has multiple demon forms and was just frozen and shattered. Now you’re searching for pieces - wait which head is this or is it an arm? Will this edge be cel shaded or do I draw this outline myself? And remember, squares are divine and green is for demons! Well, working on BJA designs almost feels like ritual magic and I’m loving it."

In case you are wondering, he is referring to our color palette here, which does not allow the color green in any type or form ;) So Patrick made our raven model and textures and also designed the mutated variations.



I really like how everything came together and had a blast working on this. The raven is a very simple creature and I am sure you will be blown away with the more complex characters Patrick is currently designing.

This devlog has become long enough so I have to end it now. Have a great weekend everyone!

Alain

Hey folks,

I am super proud to tell you that BattleJuice Alchemist won the award for Best Visual Art at DevGamm Vilnius 2023. For those of you who are not familiar with it, DevGAMM was born in the Ukraine in 2008 and has been uniting game industry professionals from Eastern Europe and beyond for over 15 years now. Each conference features multiple networking opportunities, great speakers, and new games from all over the world.

Having taken part in DevGamm last year, I would have loved to go there this year in person myself. But although I could not make it, our producer Alex from ESDigital went and represented us and our game very honorably. We had a booth there where players could play BattleJuice Alchemist:



I still have to debrief Alex whether any hardware was destroyed out of frustration or if everything went smoothly.

We already knew BattleJuice Alchemist was nominated for the Best Visual Art award, but we were not expecting to actually win.



The visual style of our game has always resonated quite well with people when I posted about it, but about two years ago, it was still quite rough around the edges (literally, the lines were way too rough). I think we could never have won a visual art award, if it wasn't for our art director Felix and our 2D/3D artist Patrick, who ironed out our art bible with me and made essential changes so the game could look how it does today.

So everyone here at Alchemical Works and ESDigital is very proud Alex can bring home this heavy beast of a trophy.



Thank you for reading! In our next bi-weekly devlog I'll return to normal and tell you more about what we are currently working on inside the game.

Alain

Hey folks,

as you may know our base-building system has been a big addition to the game and it is by far not just a cosmetic feature. I never talked about many of its intricacies, so let's take a look at the power system today!

There are devices that consume and others that generate power. There are different types of power and they are visualized by power cubes. For example, this physical generator here outputs one physical power cube:



The cube tells you that in this designated field you can place a device that consumes physical power and it will be powered. Aside from power and gold there is another resource that you need to manage when planing your base: space. Especially in higher tiers you may want to relocate power. That's where relays come into play.



This can be especially handy when building a multi-floor setup. You could place your power generators upstairs, so they take up less your precious ground floor space.



But in case you decide to have them on the ground floor anyway and are a neat freak like me, please make sure to tuck away those relays under the floor ;)



That's all for today, stay tuned for more BattleJuice Alchemist goodness and thank you for your support!

Alain

We are thrilled to announce that BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST has been nominated for the esteemed DevGAMM 2023 Best Visual Art award! ːsteamhappyː This nomination is a testament to the hard work and dedication our team has put into creating a visually stunning and captivating gaming experience.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the DevGAMM committee for recognizing our artistic achievements. We also extend our heartfelt thanks to our talented team of artists and developers whose creativity and passion have made this nomination possible.

The winners of the DevGAMM 2023 awards will be announced at the ceremony, and we eagerly await the results. Stay tuned for more updates on BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST!

Hey folks,

I have recently been working on the translation system for BattleJuice Alchemist. And surprisingly I found this to be quite a fun task to work on. Seriously! In software development there is a lot of talk of localization, internationalization and also globalization. I don't want to get in technicalities here, but just talk about some interesting stuff, so let's dive in.

First of all, what we are currently working on is the translation of actual language. This means, we are not e.g. switching visual assets for certain regions. So the basic feature here is that you can switch the language like so:



What we do first is to create a German translation, because it is the native language of our team. Further versions will be made by our publisher ESDigital. The game will come out in quite a lot of languages, but I don't want to say anything final yet.



The first challenges we have to overcome are the obvious ones: In some places you have to dynamically size the font to make the text fit a button, in others, you can implement a scrollable box or find different solutions to accommodate for varying text lengths. BattleJuice Alchemist as a complex RPG is quite heavy on the UI side, so this is a lot of work. And there is actually quite a lot of text. Every word that needs to be translated literally costs money. If the word "level" shows up in 50 places, you don't want a translator to charge you for 50 words, but 1. So you create string tables for words that are used more often, so they only pop up once in the sheet of text to be translated.

All in all I found Unreal's localization system to be super easy to work with. I was able to set up the system and provide our team member Jan with a .PO file that he then could use to make a first test translation in German. We are using a tool called Poedit that runs on the DeepL and therefore often gives you perfect pre-translations out of the box. But it is not perfect. I asked Jan to tell me about the challenges a bit, here is what he said:

When translating with Poedit, I still found there is the need to focus heavily on individual letters instead of broad meanings. Everybody knows the example with that txet taht is rdaelabe if you just scan the context. That does not cut it when checking AI-translations and made me squint my eyes every now and then. For example, strangely, "damage" was translated into "dSchaden" every time, with the "d" being utterly wrong.

We obviously had to check for possible misunderstandings. "Flask" most often got translated as "Kolben", which is technically right, but only in the context of chemistry. That would be fine in the game itself, but not when it comes to a German speaking player base, where "Kolben" would most likely be associated with the "piston" of a car engine.

An ongoing challenge is to make the German text smooth. "Frog Hop Flask", three short words, could be translated as and combined into "Froschhüpfflasche", a one word monster. The German eye stumbles over the double h, each belonging to a different noun. And then the same thing is happening to the double f...

The challenges I myself faced so far were more of dealing with the crimes I had committed in the past. I had to deal with technical debt when e.g. rewriting systems that were lazily relying on comparing text. Very simply put, the computer couldn't say if an item is a "sword" when looking at its name, because it is now called a "Schwert", because we are in a German translation.

This devlog has become a lot longer than I planned, so I'll just stop here. Just one thing I discovered and found really funny is that Unreal lets you localize your game for a LOT of cultures ;)



Let me know if you have questions or own struggles with translations, I like to chat about this stuff ;)

Have a great weekend!

Alain