BattleJuice Alchemist News

Hey folks,

this week we have some celebrating to do!

For over a year while working on the game itself, I worked on biz dev opportunities to get funding for BattleJuice Alchemist off the ground. It was a lot of work, but now it is done. First, I secured Media Funding Rhineland Palatinate, which is funding from the state I live in. Then I applied and received the German Federal Funding for Video Games. Both are amazing privileges I am incredibly thankful for.



And, last but not least, I found a great publisher who believes in my vision and allows me to even expand the scope and polish of BattleJuice Alchemist: ESDigital Games. Here comes a picture of their team and mine together:



As you can see, not everybody could be at the celebration in person, which is why our Swiss Army knife Patrick created these BattleJuice Alchemist-style portraits, so they could be in the photo. During the course of development, I will be supported by Jan, who does QA and helps with game design, Patrick, who does 2D/3D art, Dominik, who will work on music with me, and Rebecca, my agent from DDM, who will continue helping me with biz dev.

The guys from ESDigital have been doing what they do for over 25 years on a variety of games. They have multiple titles in their portfolio that are similar to BattleJuice Alchemist, such as Remedium by Sobaka Studio. In this gif you might see the similarities ;)



I love the hyper stylized look of many of ESD's games and feel like BattleJuice Alchemist has found a great home. The team and I already got started with work and I could not be happier. Thank you for following along and supporting me on this journey!

Have a great weekend!

Alain

Hey folks,

here comes another how-it-is-all-related devlog!

Debuffs have been a thing in BattleJuice Alchemist almost since day one. Enemies can use them to slow you down and cap your resource pools for a short amount of time. Here you can see an enemy debuffing the player in close combat before landing attacks:



Players can get rid of debuffs by Juicifying a Health Flask of preemptively shielding themselves against them. The new thing is that enemies now also debuff player built structures. In the following gif you can see that the tower does not emit light anymore after being debuffed:



The players on the other hand have a tool themselves to deal with this: decoys.



The decoy you can see here (a burning one) catches a debuff, so it does not affect another part of the tower. In the following gif you see the enemy using a debuff, but this time it affects the decoy instead of the illuminant, which itself continues emitting light and breaking the enemy's shield.



There is a bit of mayhem going on there, but I hope you get the gist. The player has to decide whether they think a decoy is worth the resources and tower space or if they prefer other tower components.

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed reading and have a great rest of the week!

Alain

Hey folks,

in the last devlog I gave a little sneak peek on a base-building element that's called an illuminant. But before I can explain what it does, I have to get to the main topic of this post: enemy shields. At nighttime, enemies become encapsulated by a protective night shield.



Night shields protect enemies from taking damage once, before they disperse. But while it is still nighttime, they regenerate. The player can disperse night shields with regular attacks...



...or utilize the tower element I was talking about. These illuminants disperse shields, which makes fighting close to your tower a very valid option.



Another very efficient way to deal with night shields are multi step attacks. For example, you can utilize barrels. Your explosive flask disperses the shield and triggers the barrel, which then spawns more flasks that deal damage to the now unprotected enemy.



I still have to do some testing e.g. on how fast night shields regenerate. If you want to have a look yourself in the Steam playtest, I would appreciate to hear your feedback.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend!

Alain

Hey everyone,

those of you following my devlog might have seen this coming. You can now experiment with the new base building / tower crafting feature in the Steam Playtest version!



Building your tower is not at all just cosmetics for housing, there are very functional constructions, such as shield breaking illuminants, decoys that protect your tower and automatic flask dispensers:



I implemented construction elements up to character level 15, so there is a lot more to discover than what I already talked about in previous posts.

Of course, all the new mechanics related to the new day-night cycle are also included in this patch. In the coming weeks I will explain the new elements in detail. Until then, you can start to do some discovering yourself ;)



As always, the full list of changes can be found on our Discord. I'm looking forward to hear what you all think!

Cheers,

Alain

Hey folks,

I can see the end of the tunnel regarding base-building implementation. As I already announced, it will be tied to some mysterious underused system. That system is the day-night cycle, which except for certain minor buffs has been mainly cosmetic so far. It has been overhauled visually and mechanically.



The world of BattleJuice Alchemist is always dark, even at daytime, so it was a challenge to make the days distinct from the nights without compromising the atmosphere I am going for. Beside brightness, I worked with shadows, colors, particle systems and Unreal's exponential height fog. And that new UI element ;). In the gif above, you might have spotted a splash animation at nightfall. I implemented these animations, which are visually based on our pop-up book style cutscenes, so the player can't miss daybreak or nightfall. Here is a top-down shot that shows both animations.



These new animated splash UIs made those for level-ups, demon-spawning and dying look underwhelming, so I overhauled these as well.



And this wraps up today's devlog. Next time I'll show you how we bring together the new day-night cycle and the base-building system, so stay tuned for that!

Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend!

Alain