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[Alain]

Although late, congratulations on the grant and award. The game clearly deserves it. The visual presentation is immediately captivating. I love the art style and color palette use, and I expect the character animation to become better as development progresses.
Gosh I have always marveled the the complexity involved in designing and implementing a game such as yours. And then getting it optimized to run smoothly. Seems like a very daunting task. That being said, it already looks amazing and quite satisfying to play.

Thanks for stopping by and your kind words! When I look at the title screen of your game, I feel like we both draw inspiration from some similar sources.

Regarding animations, I think they might improve a bit, but it will not be a giant leap. When defining the benchmark for the animations, I use Salt and Sanctuary as a reference. Characters move in a retro/simplistic way that is sometimes reminiscent of string puppets. The limitation is what I am able to produce and I am not a character animator in the first place. But you are not the first one bringing it up, so I will see if I can improve on animations!

The whole undertaking has been quite daunting to me as well. I hope it does not sound cocky, but I never doubt I can see it through. Turns out the biggest challenge for me was to get the project properly and securely funded. But I am close to the finishing line in that regard, fingers crossed

[Ordnas]

Congratulations on the Award! I will keep an eye to your devlog

[Alain]

Congratulations on the Award! I will keep an eye to your devlog

Thanks for the congratulations and joining the ride

[Alain]

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:

Shields & Breaking Them

Hey folks,

in the last devlog I gave a little sneak peek on a base-building element that's called an illuminant. But before I can explain what it does, I have to get to the main topic of this post: enemy shields. At nighttime, enemies become encapsulated by a protective night shield.

Night shields protect enemies from taking damage once, before they disperse. But while it is still nighttime, they regenerate. The player can disperse night shields with regular attacks...

...or utilize the tower element I was talking about. These illuminants disperse shields, which makes fighting close to your tower a very valid option.

Another very efficient way to deal with night shields are multi step attacks. For example, you can utilize barrels. Your explosive flask disperses the shield and triggers the barrel, which then spawns more flasks that deal damage to the now unprotected enemy.

I still have to do some testing e.g. on how fast night shields regenerate. If you want to have a look yourself in the Steam playtest, I would appreciate to hear your feedback.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend!

Alain

[Ordnas]

Very interesting, have you thought about not having the night shield regenerate at all after it's destroyed? An enemy with a shield that regenerates personally I consider it a bit too hard, especially if there are many of them.

[Alain]

Very interesting, have you thought about not having the night shield regenerate at all after it's destroyed? An enemy with a shield that regenerates personally I consider it a bit too hard, especially if there are many of them.

Thanks for the feedback, you are making a very good point. I have been playing with night shield regeneration time and will have your concerns in mind! At the moment, I am still in favor of them regenerating. My reasoning is that a night lasts for around 3 minutes, which is a lot longer than a combat encounter, which is usually only a few seconds to a minute long. If shields don't regenerate, I feel like the whole mechanic would lose the weight I want it to have. But we will see, I'll definitely play around with the regeneration!

[Ramos]

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?

[Ordnas]

Very interesting, have you thought about not having the night shield regenerate at all after it's destroyed? An enemy with a shield that regenerates personally I consider it a bit too hard, especially if there are many of them.

Thanks for the feedback, you are making a very good point. I have been playing with night shield regeneration time and will have your concerns in mind! At the moment, I am still in favor of them regenerating. My reasoning is that a night lasts for around 3 minutes, which is a lot longer than a combat encounter, which is usually only a few seconds to a minute long. If shields don't regenerate, I feel like the whole mechanic would lose the weight I want it to have. But we will see, I'll definitely play around with the regeneration!

Yes, I think you are right, especially if the night lasts 3 minutes. 

[Alain]

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

[vdapps]

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.

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.

[Alain]

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!

[Alain]

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

[vdapps]

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

[Alain]

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

[marcgfx]

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

[Alain]

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.

[oldblood]

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.

[Alain]

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.

[marcgfx]

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?

[Alain]

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