BattleJuice Alchemist News

Hey everyone,

I'm glad you found your way to this corner of the internet to get a little sneak peak on what is coming with the next patch of the BattleJuice Alchemist alpha playtest.

For quite some time, enemies have been able to cut off your path by sprinting ahead of you. Now you can do the same by using your brand new dash move.



This might not seem too big of a deal, but it actually is one of the bigger changes in player mobility in a while. The dash move was not easy to figure out and might need some more testing. But I am already very happy with how it turned out. I had to decide how to tie it into resource management and level progression as well as the control schemes. I ended up with the default being right clicking or pressing the Juicify key.

As always there have been multiple minor changes and bug fixes, but there is one visual change that I would like to quickly show you. I changed the visual effect that determines how objects that occlude the vision onto your character are presented.



In the gif above you see how the camera behaves when you approach a building: it tilts to a steeper angle to make navigation easier. Also, note how when you enter the ground floor of the building, the second and third are not visible and when you move up to the second floor it becomes visible and only the third floor stays invisible. But that does not do us any good when we are not inside the building. That's why I added this circular cut-out effect, which I find pretty neat:



Let me know what you think and I hope you are looking forward to the next patch so you can dash around to your heart's content.

Thank you for sticking with me and have a great weekend!

Alain

Hey everyone,

last week I sneakily pushed a patch for the open Steam playtest but did not have the time to properly tell you about it. Today I pushed another one, version 0.20205, and it is time to talk about it!

Some players were having trouble with aiming their shots in the game, so I thought about controls and accessibility a bit more. I implemented an aiming system that you can use with your mouse exclusively and without hotkeys.



To improve accessibility even more, I added inputs and changed settings as well as other things so you can now play the game completely without the keyboard. Hotkeys might still be the most efficient way to control your alchemist and nothing prevents you from playing the way you did before the patch.

In order to allow mouse-only play, I tweaked the ritual magic system. After burning a certain amount of a certain ingredient you have to chant a mantra, which was based on alphabetic letters. These letters are now replaced by runes, which can be clicked in a new UI, instead of typed with a keyboard. A second benefit from this is that the rune system makes it easier to translate the game into different languages.
As a consequence of these changes, all quests and riddles related to ritual magic were overhauled, so there are new scrolls with visual riddles to figure out.





Next week I will add additional accessibility features, but also more content, so stay tuned for the upcoming devlog.

If you want to read the full patch notes or just want to say hi, stop by on our Discord. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!

Alain

Hey everyone,

it's Patch Friday! I already gave a preview about it in the last devlog, now the new mini map and camera controls are available on the Steam open alpha playtest. If that does not rock your socks, maybe the latest entry in the environmental effect series will: There are arcane environments now!



You could already freeze rivers and burn flammable objects like trees or bushes. Now you can activate sites of arcane power: Places like graves and defiled churches are triggered by arcane damage. I love how things are really coming together now, because so many objects in our world that were just decoration before now can be interacted with in cool ways.

When an arcane area is activated, a Hell Skull spawns and follows you until its lifespan runs out or until it hits you.



You can maneuver the skull into enemies so they take the damage that was meant for you. Also, the skull occasionally spawns arcane crystals that stay on the ground after its demise and can also be utilized in combat.

Defiled churches is where the real fun starts, because cultists are immune to arcane damage and their ranged attacks happen to do arcane damage, so they tend to bring Hell Skulls about quite often. A Hell Skull exploding in an arcane environment can itself produce a new skull, which can can result in fun chain reactions.

If you want to follow the development closely or simply want to say hi, make sure to join our Discord. Have a great weekend!

Alain

Hey everyone,

recently I decided that I could no longer make this a future-me problem: some playtesters found camera movement not perfect in places. You could freely move the camera in zoomed-in third person mode, but not in top down view. Implementing free camera movement is a bigger can of worms than one would expect, but your wish is my command.



So why is this so difficult? Here is the deal: BattleJuice Alchemist now is a game where you can play in top down perspective and in third person, move by clicking and by WASD input and switch between all four combinations seamlessly. In top down mode you expect the character to move "down" when you press down. But what actually is "down"? If you rotate the camera in top down mode, "down" is not aligned with south anymore. You expect to move in reference to your camera rotation. In third person on the other hand, you maybe do not want your character to move towards the camera when you press down. Should the character walk backwards? Or should the camera pan around the character until it is behind the character again?
One person might expect that the left and right buttons in third person perspective rotate the camera, another wants them to rotate the character and a third person might want them to move the character. You want keybindings and UI buttons to turn the camera in 45 degree steps, but also want to have complete freedom to look with the mouse. How do you do that when you also walk with the mouse? All these things and quite a lot more had to be taken into consideration and new control settings and bindings hat to be implemented.

To make all of that camera movement and input comfortable to use, I had to tie in a second feature: A minimap and compass.



The minimap provided its own challenges, which were mainly performance related, but I won't bore you with that. For now, I am happy that only a bit of testing and polishing has to be done and the new features will be ready to be rolled out within the next patch.

Thank you for sticking with me and have a great weekend!

Alain

Hey everyone,

I crunched like crazy for the last few days, because I did not want to do a simple devlog this Friday. I also wanted to release the features I have worked on, so players can check them out right away in the Steam Playtest. I made it and I think it was worth it. So everything I talk about today can be explored by all you fine people right away.

Those of you following along might know that I have been implementing environmental effects lately. The first one allows you to freeze rivers and lakes, now you can light things on fire. This one turned out really cool in my opinion, because so many systems interact here: Fire has a chance to propagate, which is connected to the weather system. It is less likely for fire to spread if it is raining.



Trees burn down bit by bit. The first time you set them on fire their leaves burn away, then the upper part and so on until only the roots are left. Everytime a part burns, ash and wood materials spawn.



The spiky circles as seen in the image above indicate where fire causes damage to you and enemies. So you can utilize burning objects by kiting enemies into them.

The game world feels so much more alive now that the environmental effects are getting done one by one and I can't wait to continue working on the "arcane" environmental effect.

Let me know what you think or if you have questions join our Discord and have a great weekend!

Alain