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[Alain]

Well, I'm too late so is there a recording for this square dude?

Hahaha, yes there is one up on YouTube now:

[oahda]

Watched the VOD on Twitch, very cool Feel good about your presentation?

[Alain]

Watched the VOD on Twitch, very cool Feel good about your presentation?

So cool you watched it Well, I always feel like I can't express my thoughts perfectly in English. But I am quite happy I did not make this "BattleJuice Alchemist - The Advertisement" too much, but tried to get back to the topic of MegaGrants when I could and tried to make this a real conversation.

[oldblood]

So cool you watched it Well, I always feel like I can't express my thoughts perfectly in English. But I am quite happy I did not make this "BattleJuice Alchemist - The Advertisement" too much, but tried to get back to the topic of MegaGrants when I could and tried to make this a real conversation.

It was a great stream and you presented it well. Nicely done, and glad you got to show off the new alchemy tower building/summoning feature. Even though its still WIP, its pretty awesome to see whats coming.

[vivaladav]

Hey Alain, at last I had some time to catch up with the dev log threads on TIGSource and I couldn't miss yours!

It's amazing to see you talking with the people from Epic about the MegaGrants, you are a famous developer now my friend!

I also liked your latest dev log, especially the part about the "broken window theory", something I am definitely guilty of, especially when it's about UI code...

[Alain]

It was a great stream and you presented it well. Nicely done, and glad you got to show off the new alchemy tower building/summoning feature. Even though its still WIP, its pretty awesome to see whats coming.

Thank you so much for watching and for your support! I'm glad you're excited for the base building as well, there will be another devlog on it later today

Hey Alain, at last I had some time to catch up with the dev log threads on TIGSource and I couldn't miss yours!

It's amazing to see you talking with the people from Epic about the MegaGrants, you are a famous developer now my friend!

I also liked your latest dev log, especially the part about the "broken window theory", something I am definitely guilty of, especially when it's about UI code...

Thanks for catching up! Hahaha, I doubt the famous developer part The Inside Unreal streams are are quite niche and I was just a small part of this one. But of course I was happy to be able to join, meet nice people and talk about gamedev.

[Ramos]

Well, I'm too late so is there a recording for this square dude?

Hahaha, yes there is one up on YouTube now:

Congratulations Alain!!!
This is a good addition to your public branding & credentials


 

[Alain]

Congratulations Alain!!!
This is a good addition to your public branding & credentials

Thank you! I agree that although not great for marketing, it still was nice for branding/credentials. Also a handful of UE devs joined my discord afterwards, which I am really happy about.

[Alain]

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:

Base Building Is Evolving

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

[oldblood]

Great updates and GIFs as always. This seems like one of those features as you flesh it out, where a player can accidentally lose like 30 minutes or an hour just messing around with building out their tower. And thats a good thing! Could be fun to experiment with layouts and various benefits for summoning it during a fight--though I imagine people will figure out how to leverage that into really messing with balance haha.

[Alain]

Great updates and GIFs as always. This seems like one of those features as you flesh it out, where a player can accidentally lose like 30 minutes or an hour just messing around with building out their tower. And thats a good thing! Could be fun to experiment with layouts and various benefits for summoning it during a fight--though I imagine people will figure out how to leverage that into really messing with balance haha.

Thanks oldblood! I am also a bit afraid that I miss something that really messes with balance and I am sure players will find that something immediately

[marcgfx]

Do you have an idea how to tie in the base with your two different combat systems? Long range seems quite logical, but how will you buff the close combat system. Just questions I am asking myself.

[Alain]

Do you have an idea how to tie in the base with your two different combat systems? Long range seems quite logical, but how will you buff the close combat system. Just questions I am asking myself.

That's a very good question! The tower/base building will mainly be part of ranged combat. But what the tower does provide even in close combat is light. Enemies will get buffed considerably at night and you need the light from your tower to take that buff away from them. I am still experimenting here and I'll keep you posted on how things turn out

[Alain]

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:

Alchemical Autocannons

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

[marcgfx]

Nice work!

It certainly looks and sounds interesting. I must admit I am still on edge about how this will be fun to play. In my mind it's a complicated mine-craft-tower-defence with no enemy swarms. Will it be a requirement to build a mobile base to complete the game? How do you prevent bases from getting so overpowered that they just destroy everything. Can a base get destroyed?

I know this is not what you are going for, but maybe you can use the building mechanic in a story like way. e.g. the Zombies are on their way and will be attacking tonight. Get your base ready, build fortifications and chokes to slow them down. The Elves are providing a special weapon, place it wisely. Could be a fun way to change up the gameplay.

[oldblood]

Another awesome update, Alain. Love how the UI feels very intuitive with placement (showing where you can/can't place the autocannon + it being powered or not). It definitely ties together the ability to summon the tower in combat and leverage it to help you. Since the cannon is static in movement, I do wonder about how well it would work at range, i.e. if its more than a few "tiles" out, would it attack be too slow to actually hit the target? If it can only hit things directly in front of it, that feels like it may really limit its usefulness. I suppose giving them the ability to pivot and aim would probably make them a bit borderline OP though? But that observation is limited in that its based solely on that last GIF so may not be indicative of how it actually plays currently.

[bryku]

Nice work!

It certainly looks and sounds interesting. I must admit I am still on edge about how this will be fun to play. In my mind it's a complicated mine-craft-tower-defence with no enemy swarms. Will it be a requirement to build a mobile base to complete the game? How do you prevent bases from getting so overpowered that they just destroy everything. Can a base get destroyed?

I know this is not what you are going for, but maybe you can use the building mechanic in a story like way. e.g. the Zombies are on their way and will be attacking tonight. Get your base ready, build fortifications and chokes to slow them down. The Elves are providing a special weapon, place it wisely. Could be a fun way to change up the gameplay.

I second this! Initially, I had the impression that the game is a Diablo-like clone, and now it might be leaning into tower defense, or maybe automation (think Factorio?).

Or, maybe you're aiming more towards the mechanics that "V Rising" has? I mean I haven't played it, but mechanically it seems to have some similarities...?

[James K. Isaac]

Love your art style, atmospheric, clear and engaging. The base-building dynamic is really intriguing. That it ties into wider gameplay is something missing from many games. This gives it a purpose and makes it worthwhile, building on the sense of achievement. Looking really good at this stage, you have so much to grip the player with.

[Alain]

Nice work!

It certainly looks and sounds interesting. I must admit I am still on edge about how this will be fun to play. In my mind it's a complicated mine-craft-tower-defence with no enemy swarms. Will it be a requirement to build a mobile base to complete the game? How do you prevent bases from getting so overpowered that they just destroy everything. Can a base get destroyed?

Thanks so much for all the questions, it really helps me to always hear your thought on this tower building element on the game, which is, as you say, a tricky thing. To anwer your questions: I want to keep the tower optional to a certain degree. A bit like with 1v1 combat and top down gameplay. So if you are not into it that much, you can keep your interaction with the system to a minimum. As for destruction, at the moment I do not plan for the tower elements to be destructible, but want to keep it in the back of my head. How I try to keep the base/tower building from being overpowered is cooldowns: The autocannon for example can't fire rapidly (I removed the UI for the last two gifs that indicate the cannons' cooldown). There is also quite a bit of testing in front of me to make sure this is really fun and balanced.

I know this is not what you are going for, but maybe you can use the building mechanic in a story like way. e.g. the Zombies are on their way and will be attacking tonight. Get your base ready, build fortifications and chokes to slow them down. The Elves are providing a special weapon, place it wisely. Could be a fun way to change up the gameplay.

This is a nice idea to have the tower used especially in events as you describe. I'll have to think about it a bit, because I really like this idea for quests!

Another awesome update, Alain. Love how the UI feels very intuitive with placement (showing where you can/can't place the autocannon + it being powered or not). It definitely ties together the ability to summon the tower in combat and leverage it to help you. Since the cannon is static in movement, I do wonder about how well it would work at range, i.e. if its more than a few "tiles" out, would it attack be too slow to actually hit the target? If it can only hit things directly in front of it, that feels like it may really limit its usefulness. I suppose giving them the ability to pivot and aim would probably make them a bit borderline OP though? But that observation is limited in that its based solely on that last GIF so may not be indicative of how it actually plays currently.

Thank you! The range of this cannon is quite limited, it can't hit things very far away. You have to kite enemies into the trigger zone. In the second gif you can briefly see the area the powered cannon is targeting (and triggered by), it is an image of an explosion on the ground. It is a circular area and I plan to have different shapes for later building tiers. Pivoting and aiming is not planned at the moment, but also cool and maybe OP as you say

I second this! Initially, I had the impression that the game is a Diablo-like clone, and now it might be leaning into tower defense, or maybe automation (think Factorio?).

Or, maybe you're aiming more towards the mechanics that "V Rising" has? I mean I haven't played it, but mechanically it seems to have some similarities...?

Thanks bryku! I would not go so far with this mechanic that the game could ever be compared to Factorio, but as you say, V Rising is a perfect comparison and where I drew inspiration from. Over the last year I realized that the game "just" being a Diablo clone with deck-building elements might not be ideal. I wanted to lean into the fantasy of being an alchemist who solves problems with science and crafting more. The first association from many people has been "Don't Starve". So by adding the ability to build a base and machines is also a way to cater to that.

Love your art style, atmospheric, clear and engaging. The base-building dynamic is really intriguing. That it ties into wider gameplay is something missing from many games. This gives it a purpose and makes it worthwhile, building on the sense of achievement. Looking really good at this stage, you have so much to grip the player with.

So glad you like the idea This is exactly what I thought and what marcgfx was worried about in the past: base building has to have some function beyond being able to construct four walls and have the fantasy the character lives within them. I hope I can nail that when iterating on the system.

[Alain]

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:

Pop-Up Book Cinematics

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!

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