BattleJuice Alchemist News

Hey everyone!

We are currently knee-deep in the visual overhaul of the whole game. Patrick is doing a great job working on textures for 3d assets and I am grinding away on the UI. But that is something for another devlog when the results are presentable. Today I'd like to talk about our haunted place system a bit more.



This video is an introduction to haunted places, but I'll briefly explain them again. Ritual places and possession are predominant themes in the story of BattleJuice Alchemist and now they become even more relevant mechanics-wise. In the picture above you see our very first haunted place, the Chopping Block. You solve a small riddle to activate it and then fight the possessed site itself. It is able to do a multitude of attacks like spawning minions, AOE damage, debuffs and so on.

To make buildings more fun to explore, I decided to add two more haunted places that do not spawn in the wilderness but inside structures. The Begging Bowl spawns in churches and the Creepy Container in abandoned farm houses.





You can repeatedly activate a haunted place and defeating it gets more difficult each time you do so. In the end you get to choose a reward for your efforts. I found this to be a bit underwhelming and wanted to flesh out these events. So I decided that after "leveling up" a haunted place, you can activate it a last time, which spawns a unique enemy that is the warden of the place. Here is a little impression of the Biting Barrel that appears at the "Creepy Container":



So that's it for today. Please note that these changes are on our internal testing branch only and not yet on the public playtest version on Steam. I will update the Steam version not too far in the future, but want to wait for the big visual overhaul to do so.

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

Alain

Hey everyone!

as those of you following the development of BattleJuice Alchemist might know, I am a big fan of Unreal Engine. It is so accessible, especially its blueprint system gives developers like me who do not consider themselves a programmer first the opportunity to tackle big projects. Beside providing this great tool, Epic Games financially supports game developers and other creators using it.

About half a year ago I applied for an Epic MegaGrant and two days ago I received a congratulatory mail of acceptance from Epic Games. I am incredibly thankful and excited to be counted among the recipients.



At the end of 2021 I commited to developing BattleJuice Alchemist full-time and expanded Alchemical Works into a small team. The MegaGrant comes just at the right point in time for us, I almost can't believe it.

I am so happy and also want to thank everybody following along the development of the game. I know some of you are developers as well, so if you use Unreal Engine, consider applying for a MegaGrant. I wasn't sure if there was a chance of being chosen as an indie dev with his first title, but evidently it is.

Have a wonderful weekend everybody!

Alain

Hey everyone!

I have been thinking about devlogs and progress reports recently. I decided that I want to post written devlogs more regularly (biweekly) and video devlogs only on bigger events or updates. I want to keep these write-ups brief and juicy, so let's dive right in.

[h2]Flask Re-Drawing Mechanic[/h2]

Over the last couple of weeks, I got quite some feedback from people who played the game for the first time. Some of them said that fighting was fun, but they felt it got repetitive after a few hours. There is a lot of depth and possibilities for different builds, so I think the problem is that I am not encouraging players enough to experiment with all the possibilities already in the game. I will address that with various changes over the next weeks. In the end, I also want to make a new tutorial to familiarize players with all the abilities they have at their disposal beside throwing explosive flasks and simply blowing up enemies.

The first change is a re-drawing mechanic. You have 2 fixed flasks and 3 random flasks at you disposal. The 3 random flasks are drawn from your "deck" of 10 flasks in your cauldron. To have control over their "hand" of 3 flasks, players tended to only put 3 flasks into their deck. To encourage branching out, I implemented a mechanic that lets you re-draw your hand when using a Juicified Liquid flask.





This way, you do not necessarily have to use a flask and waste resources on it, just to free up a drawing slot. We have to do some testing on this, but it feels like a good change right now. It should give players agency and opportunities for strategic decision-making.


[h2]Fog of War[/h2]

Game development is a process of iterating. We go over things again and again until they feel satisfying for the time being. For me, one of these never-ending stories is maps. After my last update the square nature of the tiles made the local map look a bit unpolished. So I went over the system again visually and mechanically and man, it feels a lot better now.

We now have two stages of discovery. You discover a large circular area around you. When moving out of a discovered area, a fog of war creeps back. Discovered special places stay visible though.

Before:

After:

Please note that these changes are on our internal testing branch only and not yet on the public playtest version on Steam.

That is it for today, thank you for reading and have a nice weekend and maybe stop by on our Discord server!

Hey everyone!

I hope you had a good start into the new year of 2022. Beside working on more content inside the game, I edited a very short video to introduce people to BattleJuice Alchemist. I went for the YouTube #shorts format, which has to be vertical and under 60 seconds long. I guess that is how the cool kids roll these days, so I gave it a try. You can watch the cinematic masterpiece here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Have a nice weekend and maybe stop by on our Discord server!

Alain

Hey everyone!

I recently brought together a few systems that have been in the game for quite a while. I taught the world map algorithm to tell the procedural level generation system how to do its job better. This came with some changes to the maps themselves and hopefully makes exploration more interesting. If you want to find out more, you can watch a short devlog video here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Please note that this is a preview and that all these changes are not yet on the public branch of the Steam playtest, which is still running. If you want to join, all you have to do is to click the "Request Access" button on the Steam store page.

Have a nice day and thank you for reading and watching. If you are interested in more behind the scenes content, please stop by on our Discord server. See you there!

Alain