BattleJuice Alchemist News

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

Hey folks,

we won an Emerging Talent Award sponsored by AMD at the the World Trailer Awards last Sunday! I'm really happy and proud about this great mention.



Technically the award was for our latest gameplay trailer, which I realize is quite outdated, but I'll get to updating it once we are feature complete. But the jury said that while awarding the gameplay trailer, it was our cinematic trailer that first caught their attention and they really liked it. It has been around for a while, but I never really talked about it in a devlog, so let's catch up on that!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

First of all, this cinematic serves double duty as both our cinematic trailer and as the intro cinematic for Act 1. There will be three more of these: two in between acts and one at the end of the game.

What I am probably most asked about is the voice acting. Our narrator is the incredible Dave LaChance, who also voiced our latest gameplay trailer. When searching for a talent, I got dozens of audition recordings, which I hadn't expected. Dave's was the one that I instantly fell in love with. It turned out that on top of that he is super professional and the most pleasant person to work with. So I'm really glad I got to work with him and will again in the future.

The second aspect of the cinematic that people seem to like a lot is the pop-up book.



The reasoning behind the concept was a quite pragmatic one. It allowed me to rehash in-game assets but present them in a unique and interesting way. When revising the cinematic, our illustrator Patrick helped me out with polishing the textures of the pop-up book pages. This was also an essential step for us to give Patrick a chance get familiar with the general visual style. Patrick can now create illustrations in the same style out of thin air and does not necessarily need an in-game 3d asset to base his illustration on, which means in the future we can be more creative with the scenes shown on the pop-up pages.

On a technical note, I am animating and rendering the cinematics in 3dsMax. It has been my to-go-to 3D tool for 20 years, so it is just the fastest for me to work with. The downside of this workflow is that of the total 650 MB of the packaged game as it is right now, 150 MB are taken up by the one video file for the intro cinematic alone. While this is not terrible and I expect the full game to still be less than 3 GB, we could save 600 MB by animating in the Unreal Engine sequencer and not include video files. Additionally, it would be the more flexible workflow regarding localization and making changes overall. When starting work on the next cinematic, I'll definitely give this alternative workflow a shot.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend!

Alain

Hey folks,

in the last devlog I ended with teasing some kind of mystery cube. Here comes the explanation...



The cubes you see here are power markers. Corresponding to our damage types, there is physical, fire, air, water and arcane power. Power markers are the "output" of power generators. You place power consuming elements on them to be — you might have guessed it — powered.



The new power consuming building element you see here is an explosive flask dispenser.



This is where base building starts to tie into combat. If powered, the flask dispenser fires explosive flasks at enemies that are unlucky enough to be kited in front of the dispenser by the player.



Now, what's next for me to do is fleshing out the system with more buildable elements and connecting all of this to another already existing system, which I will talk about in the next devlog.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this devlog, maybe consider joining our Discord.

Have great weekend!

Alain

Hey folks,

so I'm still knee deep in implementing base building and will continue to work on it for the next few weeks. I'm happy with the progress, so let me quickly show you what has happened.

We now have a contextual UI for base building, it is the dark purple box on the bottom center of the screen. Also, I set up hotkeys that make the new building actions like placing, rotating and deleting easier. Speaking of which, here you can see those actions:



I also added a few more building elements and removed some. I'm trying to get to an efficient palette that is as condensed as possible, but still leaves room for creativity. For the first time, I am now able to build a tower how I envisioned it when planning the system:



You might have spotted an engine thingy in those gifs. Those of you following me on social media probably saw me posting about it already. Base building in BattleJuice Alchemist will not be cosmetic, but have purpose in fights as well, which is where things like the engine come into play. Let me end with a little teaser here, maybe you can guess what this going on in this last gif. It will be the topic of the next devlog ;)



Thanks for reading and I hope to see you on our Discord.

Have great weekend!

Alain