BattleJuice Alchemist News

Hey everyone,

those of you following along might already know that I have been working on a new tutorial level for some time. As I explained in my last devlog video, I had to build a system that allowed me to "quickly" create levels that are not fully procedural. It worked out great and the tutorial level is done now. Here is a sneak peek of the "Mountain Pass" tutorial map:







BattleJuice Alchemist had tutorials before. It was quite basic stuff: windows popped up and explained some aspect of the game or asked you to do something. Watching people play I often saw them closing the windows instinctively in the way you close an ad popping up in your browser. I could not remove 100% of the pop-up tutorials, but drastically reduced their number and got rid of them for the whole Mountain Pass level completely. The level takes about 20 minutes for a new player to complete and mainly uses two new elements to teach the game's mechanics:

1. Tutorial Scrolls



You find scrolls scattered around the level that you can pick up and read. I found this a lot more satisfying, because who does not like to pick up loot, right? In the GIF above you can also see a little magic swirl that spawns in front of the player and points towards tutorial scrolls and other quest items.

To make the process of learning more fun, I made pictograms for every scroll to teach gameplay elements in a more visual and riddle-like way than plain text. This for example is one of the first scrolls that teaches you to equip and use a flask that replenishes your mana (called "Liquid" in our world):



There is also a written version for every tutorial scroll in your quest log if you can't figure out the meaning of a pictogram.


2. Tutorial Shrines



These shrines are text messages left for you to make sure you can make your way through the Mountain Pass. Nothing to ground-breaking here, but I think it is a good thing the players activate these themselves instead of getting pesky pop-ups and also that the shrines are rooted in the game's narrative.

I will test the Mountain Pass level with a few more players and it then should go live on the public branch of the Steam playtest pretty soon.

Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!


Alain

Hey everyone,

there is a lot of hustling and bustling going on in the BattleJuice Alchemist factory. The new tutorial level is taking shape and business opportunities are on the horizon. Patrick is cracking away on the texture overhaul and I also set aside some time to work on some eye candy.



In the gif above you see that Juice now carries a candle on the top of his barrel backpack. This gave us the chance to add a light source low above the ground that results in neat shadows from the flora he passes.

A second visual improvement was adding some physics to breakable objects. Destroying stuff feels a lot more satisfying now:



I will talk a bit more about the mechanics of the new tutorial level soon, here is a little sneak peek of the shrines that will guide your way through it:



Three moving images could only be spoiled by adding more text, so all that's left for me is to thank you for reading and wish you a good start into the weekend!

Alain

Hey everyone!

While I have been posting written devlogs over the last weeks, this Friday I have a new video for a change. I talk a bit about development news, but mainly how I am making a new tutorial level. I found a quite nice solution to generate hand-crafted levels for our otherwise procedural game. I might even be able to utilize it create dungeons in the future!

You can watch the video here:


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you want to get in touch, make sure to hop on the Discord server.

Thank you for supporting me making BattleJuice Alchemist and have a nice weekend!

Alain

Hey there!

We received a lot of valuable feedback during the open alpha playtest on Steam and in our eyes the game has been getting better and better because of that. Without people participating in the playtest we would be lost, so thank you! And now let's buckle up, here comes our latest update that is already live and ready to be explored.


[h3]General Notes[/h3]
Update 0.18604 includes all changes from 0.15801 and above. We consider this an intermediate update, because e.g. there are no tutorials for the new features yet and the visual overhaul is not 100% complete. But this is an alpha and I guess everybody knows that it is a work in progress.


[h3]Mechanics[/h3]
We changed a lot of things to make basic flask use more exciting. Lisiting all of them would most likely bore you, so I tug them away in the TL;DR section below. But let me tell you about two things I find particularly cool. The first is entering bullet time by using a juicified Juice flask:



The second is pushing and pulling enemies across the battlefield. You can push with Big Bang flasks or with the explosion caused by a juicified Frog Hop flask. You can pull with a black hole that spawns when using a juicified Smoke flask:




[h3]Visuals[/h3]
We have been overhauling our UI as well as lighting and texturing of our 3d world. In a nutshell, we are trying to improve readability by removing black splotches and jittery lines while not loosing the unique style of the game.

OLD:

NEW:

While the changes might not be crazy visible to many of you, we found that especially the 3d environments have become a lot easier to navigate.


[h3]Items[/h3]
We added a new item type called tinctures. They are used on items you already possess to improve their stats and are dropped by unique enemies.




[h3]Enemies[/h3]
We added three "haunted places" to the game. These are structured like small events or quests: You find them and solve a small riddle to activate them. Then you fight a tough fight and get to choose a reward. Doing so two times unlocks a last activation that spawns a unique mini boss. You can find out more about haunted places in this devlog:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1384060/view/5782062144976286145

[h3]World[/h3]
You are now able to roam the countryside that once was New England, not only the starting area of Caribou Valley. New story locations for Act 1 will come when we hit Early Access, but I hope you fill enjoy exploring the wilderness while waiting for that. You unlock new areas by finding signposts at the borders of a level.


[h3]Next Steps[/h3]
Beside the continuation of the texture overhaul, we are currently working on a tutorial level that will familiarize players with the all the varieties of the flask-based combat system and shows off our features better than before.

If you enjoyed this update and if you want to support BattleJuice Alchemist, you can help us by testing out the new features or even telling a friend about the game.


[h3]TL;DR[/h3]
For those of you who want to dig really deep and are interested in more details, you can find all changes listed below.

Have a great rest of the week!

Alain

0.18604

Various
- Fixed a bug where very rarely companion would not spawn correctly.
- Fixed a bug where ritual fire menu would not close when walking away.

World
- Fixed a bug where some levels were not accessible although discovered and not locked.



0.18603

Various
- Fixed problem with navigation in buildings



0.18602

Various
- Minor improvement on player movement.



0.18601

Mechanics
- The Steady combo now triggers after 2 flasks of the same tyme instead of 3.

Items
- Fixed a bug where crafting a legendary arm barrel gave you a common one.
- Added a flying text telling you when your inventory is full.
- Enemies are no longer pulled into a Smoke Flask rift from far away.
- Fixed a bug where items' grade would not upgrade when tincture was used on them.

Enemies
- Enemies are on a brief cooldown after being pushed or pulled.
- Fixed a bug where player could gain XP from enemies killed by environment while player was dead.
- Fixed a bug where enemies' range indicators could get burned in and did not deactivate.

World
- Slightly brightened ground textures.
- Fixed grass occasionally floating in the air.

Various
- Pause menu now returns to selection menu after menu is closed and does not open last selected sub menu.
- Fixed jittery motion when player stopped moving.
- Slightly increased player's capabilities for changing directions quickly.



0.18501

Mechanics
- Player resource regeneration times and draw time is not affected by bullet time anymore.
- Changed bullet time speed from 33% to 50%.
- Implemented a combo system. Combos are triggered when flasks are used in a certain sequence. There are currently the combos "Steady" and "Versatile" to discover.


Items
- Using a Juicified Liquid flask now re-draws your three random flasks.
- Slightly changed basic Health and Liquid boni on items as well as minimum from stats.
- Added new item "Tincture of Merit". Tinctures can be applied to pieces of equipment to improve their stats.
- Juicifying a Juice flask now costs 100 Juice (remember that base Juice return on use is 50, so actual cost is 50.
- Juicifying a Juice flask lets you enter bullet time. Works in close combat as well as in top down view.
- Juicifying a Smoke flask now creates a rift that pulls enemies towards it.
- Exploding Barrels now spawn the juicified version of their corresponding flask.
- Increased base radius of juicified Frog Hop's explosion radius from 300 to 500.
- Big Bang flask and juicified Frog Hop's explosion knock back enemies.
- Fixed a bug where items of legendary rarity rolled incorrect boni.


Enemies
- Fixed porcupine fighting range, which was accidentally set to 0.
- Only enemies with the affix Hero and Champion alarm other enemies. Note that all Demons internally have the Hero affix.
- Enemies now ignore the player for a longer period of time after spawning.
- Level cap of haunted place UI now shows "max level reached" when at max level.
- Haunted places' UI now show level even when not active.
- Haunted places' spray attack now correctly damages the player. It also damages enemies and destroys barrels. Same goes for the explosion and homing attacks.
- Adjusted haunted place's health calculation (comparable to enemies' health caculation now).
- Haunted places now all have a fixed set of attacks available to them instead of all.
- Reduced number of minions spawning from haunted places.
- Attack cooldown for haunted places reduced from 8s to 4s.
- Added fog effect to make damaging rain attack of haunted places more visible.
- Once haunted place's health drops below 33%, damaging rain is always on, even if it usually does not have damaging rain as an attack type.
- Damage reflection now works on haunted places.
- Added two more haunted places: the Begging Bowl and the Creepy Container.
- Slightly decreased all enemies' attack cooldown in close combat.


World
- Trees and stumps now don not spawn in direct vicinity of town anymore to prevent possibly blocking an exit.
- Fixed a bug where chests could be unreachable because of spawning inside mountains.
- Splashing sources of water do not spawn in Caribou Creek anymore.
- Chests do not spawn in splashing sources of water anymore and not too close to map borders.
- The game now saves discovered areas. Gets reset when changing world seed.
- Landmarks like chests, altars, haunted places and signposts get discovered on the map from a certain distance now.
- Progress on discovery on world map (signpost) now gets saved. Changing the seed in the character selection menu resets this progress.
- Overhauled navigation collision in buildings.


Various
- Overhauled follow camera turn speed while zoomed in using direct input controls. It is now also effected by camera turn speed settings.
- Fixed an issue with camera rotation when crossing tiles while zoomed in.
- Visual overhaul: General lighting and textures. Not nearly all texures have been repainted yet so this is an ongoing process.
- Overhauled fog of war: area around player gets discovered, but semi-transparent fog of war grows back when moving.
- Item grade now showing in item info.
- Tweaked Camera distance.



0.17401

Important
- When playing a character from an older version you may need to log into a game, leave and log in again for changes to take effect.
- Since many systems are still under heavy development, savegames from oder versions might now work perfectly as intended.

Items
- Explosion of Juicified Frog Hop flask changed from fire to physical damage.
- Normal use of Explosive flask and Big Bang flask now do physical damage, Juicified use does fire damage.
- Increased base damage of Juicified Frog Hop flask from 10 to 20.
- Increased Freeze Flask normal radius from 400 to 500 and Juicified radius from 600 to 700 to be able to destroy breakables.
- Damage bonus now prioritized when rolling stats for Freeze flask.

Enemies
- Unique enemies now drop random dust instead of only legendary dust.
- Circle on ground when enemies aggressive made a bit more subtle.
- Enemies' sound effect for telegraphing ranged attack was changed.
- Pumpkin ranged damage type changed to fire.

NPCs & Story
- Changed the way companions are saved and loaded, old savegames should be fine though.

World
- World map of Act 1 is now opened for traveling. It does not yet contain story locations other than Caribou Creek.
- Level map now has "fog of war" that gets lifted when the player moves.
- Changed tile and object generation algorithm for more varied landscape.

Various
- Tooltip and character sheet (flask page) now state damage type.
- Blood on ground when player is damaged now scales with damage in relation to maximum health.
- Fixed sound concurrency issues when multiple enemies are attacking in range combat.
- Fixed a bug where the world map menu could stay open although player walked out of interaction range.
- Fixed an issue where title and loading screens were not positioned correctly on ultra-wide monitors.

Hey everyone,

one important thing we took away from recent player feedback was that strategic decision making should be more pronounced in the game from the beginning on. We tackled the problem by visually overhauling environments to make them easier to read, which is an ongoing process. But we also added some mechanics:

1. Players can instantly draw a new hand of flasks (which I explained in an earlier devlog).
2. Players can enter bullet time at a small resource cost.
3. Players can push enemies with explosions and pull them towards a black hole to control the battlefield in top down view. This is my new favorite thing.

In this devlog I want to talk about the second mechanic: bullet time.



As you can see in the gif above, the player (in other words: me) enters bullet time to make precise movement decisions. In bullet time, players have the advantage that their flask drawing speed is not slowed down. This means that although they move more slowly, they can still use and throw flasks at normal speed for that epic Neo-From-The-Matrix-Feeling (TM).

Watching the gif I realized that I racked up a 4x combo like the sick pro gamer I am in my own game. Yes, combos are a thing now, too ;)

If you are interested, you can watch the full 1 minute combat sequence in this fancy vertical Youtube short:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I'm pushing the latest version to our internal testing branch today and if our diligent QA bee Jan does not find any terrible bugs, it will also go live on the public playtest version on Steam next week. There is a crapload of new and changed things in this upcoming version that I will present in the following devlogs. Next up for me is to make a new tutorial level to include all the new fancy stuff.

That is it for today, thank you for reading and have a nice weekend!

Alain