Nice, looking forward to see some of the new combat action!

It was fun to watch you make that tree. I think you are doing a great job restricting yourself regarding details and colors!

Cool, I like the lightning effect!

Cool, I'm looking forward to see how your world generation evolves. Keep up the good work!

I think you are right. Currently the ones you can't use are actually the ones that stand out. So maybe I need to color the background of the ones you can use. I can maybe layer over black lines to darken the ones that are too expensive. UI is one of the toughest things for me. I think it should feel more playfull, but still be visually clear. I find it very hard.

Sounds like a plan! I agree, UI is crazy hard for me as well.

It's a tough thing to balance. It's either useless or overpowered. But if it's too OP it breaks the game and possibly makes it less fun. Can you grind the game to make a huge OP base?

Very true, and there is a lot of balancing still ahead of us. Yes, you can grind the game for money and build a very powerful base. How powerful exactly it can get still has to be tested

Great to hear about the upgrades! My feedback on the UI would be that the diagonal lines aren't the clearest indicator for unavailable upgrades. Just looking at the images, I noticed them as something special and asked myself what they mean, but I would not have guessed they mean "this is too expensive". As you say, you already experimented with the price being red, which you did not like. Maybe experiment with brightness?

I had to stop a bit with greyboxing, I have some performance issues to reach 60fps because of too many lights in the level. I am putting in various triggers for switching the lights only when the player enters the area.

I think it is great you always keep performance in mind. Maybe you can get away with deactivating shadow casting on some light sources? But I am sure you already played around with that.

Wow, Alain, this just keeps getting more and more features! You are a machine. Wow. Definitely starting to feel very genre-bending and genre-blending! The decoys are a super interesting way of expanding on the debuff mechanic.

Thanks oldblood! Yes, I am adding elements from other genres here, but I try to keep the game an ARPG at its heart and not force these features onto the player. They are not forced to interact with the tower/debuff/decoy mechanics, if they choose to ignore the whole base building at large and just want to head into fights, just them against the monsters. This is important to me, because I think making a game unique and something new can hurt marketing-wise.

There is not such a thing as "too many explosions".

Nice, cool progress! Your enemies interacting with the destructibles makes them feel alive (despite being skeletons) and part of a real world.

Do the decoys catch all debuffs, or just a single one?

They catch one debuff and "sit it out". So, after the debuff's duration runs out, the decoy is ready to catch the next one one. If you have a fast enemy or multiple enemies debuffing, a single decoy won't catch all debuffs coming in.

I love the idea of this project. Looking forward to follow your progress!

Nice, so there's another strategy involved. Making it a bit more mixed genre, than just pure hack-and-slash ARPG.

That's right, there is definitely more to it than pure hack-and-slash. When people playtested, some said they would appreciate to see more depth being involved and I myself as a player am also always up for that

[BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:]

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:

Debuffs & Decoys

Hey folks,

here comes another how-it-is-all-related devlog!

Debuffs have been a thing in BattleJuice Alchemist almost since day one. Enemies can use them to slow you down and cap your resource pools for a short amount of time. Here you can see an enemy debuffing the player in close combat before landing attacks:

Players can get rid of debuffs by Juicifying a Health Flask of preemptively shielding themselves against them. The new thing is that enemies now also debuff player built structures. In the following gif you can see that the tower does not emit light anymore after being debuffed:

The players on the other hand have a tool themselves to deal with this: decoys.

The decoy you can see here (a burning one) catches a debuff, so it does not affect another part of the tower. In the following gif you see the enemy using a debuff, but this time it affects the decoy instead of the illuminant, which itself continues emitting light and breaking the enemy's shield.

There is a bit of mayhem going on there, but I hope you get the gist. The player has to decide whether they think a decoy is worth the resources and tower space or if they prefer other tower components.

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed reading and have a great rest of the week! And, because maybe I don't say it often enough, don't forget to wishlist

Alain

- another small neat feature is adjusting screen text color intensity to ambient light intensity. 2D texts are of course not part of shading model, so I use just approximation. In real world, screen is emitter, so it's not even physically correct, but it was not pleasant to eyes to have full intensity terminal text color in dark levels. So it's like sort of eye-saver being implemented in all terminals in this strange world.

Interesting, I never thought about that. Seems like you found a solution that's pleasant to the eye though!

Nice update, looking forward to destructible stuff

I just realized that you are also in UE. Man, I have been tweaking the navmesh in my game for literally years and it is a never ending story. I assume you are in UE5, maybe improvements have been made to the system by now.

Yes, I also use UE for my project! Honestly, I don't know if it's improved in UE5, the projects I've worked on in the past didn't have Navmesh in particolar complex area, or I did not have a Navmesh at all (in driving titles for example), so I've always been comfortable with it so far. Maybe this project is the one where I'll make more complicated use of Navmesh?

What problems did the Navmesh give you for example? 

In the beginning, my issue was working with a navmesh on completely procedural terrain and if I remember correctly, instanced static meshes also posed a problem when interacting with the navmesh. But that was years ago. Recently I added structures that the player can build themselves, which also caused me some headaches. Once I got good results for the navmesh on player created structures, it had become worse in other places I wasn't looking at. The problem is that I have no way to quickly fix something by changing the level geometry, because of that whole procedural nature of the game.

We've officially got the Steam page live yesterday, Valve was able to solve the permissions bug.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2106280/Moonbriar/

So great, congratulations! Wishlisted!

Nice touch with those shields. I appreciate that game is shifting towards "strategies" elements. Different strategies for different enemies. This can be more refreshing than straightforward ARPG.

Yes, I also really like that. It is not the strongest element of BattleJuice Alchemist yet, but I'm trying to get there!

Btw, I not noted in previous devlogs. Do you will have "fighting sidekicks"? I know you have Plato, but not sure if he's fighting. Maybe it's irrelevant now in late stages of development, but with possible another sidekicks fighting as well, I can imagine more strategies involved (Giants: Citizen Kabuto came to my mind). But I'm aware that such thing can make testing and tweaking harder by order of magnitude. Even without that, your mechanics are cool compared to "simpler" ARPG-s.

Well, at the moment there is only Plato and he does his freeze attack to help you out. He will also play a small role in the story, so there are no plans for other sidekicks for now. But I thought that we could have items that change Plato's attack or behavior in some way, which I also think could be cool!

You have solid progress here Alain, but as a side note, will all these eye-candy effects and mechanics increase the minimum PC configuration on which the game can be played in comparison to what was originally planned?

Thank you, Ramos! The new effects and mechanics will not increased the hardware requirements. In fact, I did an optimization pass recently so the game runs better than it did a year ago