BattleJuice Alchemist News

Good news everyone!

The cat-tastic playable prologue for Cats on Duty is now available to download for free!

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It’s a purr-fectly hilarious and action-packed blend of real-time strategy, tower defense, and match-3 mechanics, where heavily armed battle-hardened cat veterans of rodent skirmishes and yarn tangles take charge in defending their homeland (and litter boxes) against the forces of great evil!

The Steam Prologue contains the whole first chapter of Cats on Duty spread over 10 captivating levels, each showcasing a unique challenge and certain game feature. There is even a minigame, and a full boss fight to get your claws into, to prepare you for what’s to come in the final game.

Here you can also try out the co-op mode with your friends or family. One player focuses on the tile-matching field of the game screen to win the food needed to recruit and upgrade your battle cats while the other builds an unbreakable line of defense. Co-op mode can be easily activated or deactivated from the start menu or as you play.

With ‘cat’ and ‘kitten’ difficulty levels available, you can adjust game difficulty on the fly should you find the current level too hard or too easy for your skills or mood. You will also be able to carry over your Prologue save files into the main game so you can either continue from where you left off or reset the game progress in the settings menu and start over!

So try the free Prologue and add Cats on Duty to your wishlist!

TRY OUT FOR FREE

Attention all alchemy grand masters!🔮

Join us for an enchanting showcase of BattleJuice Alchemist at Gamescom Asia on October 22nd (Sunday), 12:30 SG/06:30 CEST. Don't miss the Indie Wavemakers / GameStart Asia livestream on Twitch and YouTube to witness the magical world of BattleJuice Alchemist come to life!

We are thrilled to announce that BattleJuice Alchemist will be showcased at Gamescom Asia event in Singapore from October 19-22! Join us at Stand BB21 in the Trade Zone and in the Entertainment Zone (in the Indie Zone by Wavemakers Stands Indie 21-24)!

BattleJuice Alchemist will also be participating in the Indie Wavemakers / GameStart Asia livestream - you can check out the exclusive gameplay on the event’s Twitch and YouTube channels on Sunday, October 22, 12:30 SG/06:30 CEST.

Hey folks!

Welcome back to another development update for BattleJuice Alchemist! This time we delve into the realm of particle systems. Understanding them is crucial for enhancing our hyper-stylized, low-poly look while maintaining good performance.



For those non-developers among you, a particle system is a simulated group of tiny, individual objects known as particles. These particles can represent various elements such as fire, smoke, sparks, you name it. Particles are lightweight and dynamic and using them we can add a lot of vividness to our game.



But we have to be cautious... as we continue our journey, we encounter a formidable adversary: overdraw. It transpires when transparent objects stack atop each other, causing rendering complexity to increase. The cost of rendering transparency intensifies with each overlapping layer, jeopardizing our game's performance. Luckily, Unreal Engine bestows upon us a potent tool: Shader Complexity mode.



Green signifies efficiency, whereas red warns of rendering extravagance. By looking at Complexity mode, we can pinpoint areas where overdraw festers, allowing us to optimize our particle systems at the critical points. Our low-poly, hyper-stylized art style grants us a boon, sparing us from the complexities of naturalistic rendering. Yet, transparency, especially lit transparency, can become a problem, if we are not careful.

Let me end with two Unreal specific best practices that I found useful regarding the performance of particle systems:

1. I always manually set every particle system to "Use Fixed Relative Bounding Box" to keep e.g. fast, far-travelling sparks under control.

2. I avoid using the light module in emitters. They are tempting but hit performance pretty hard in my experience.

That's all for today, thanks for reading! Until next time, happy playing / designing / coding :)

Alain

We're thrilled to announce that BattleJuice Alchemist is taking part in the Realms Deep event organized by 3D Realms. The game was recently unveiled, and we've just released an exciting new trailer. Stay tuned for more thrilling updates!