DevLog: New Gameplay Stream, FearFest Interview & More
Hey everyone,
this fine Friday I have a mixed bag of devlog-worthy goodies for you, so let's dive right into it.
I had to talk to a lot of people in the wake of Gamescom, which was fun, but also time-consuming. Afterwards I also got around to recording me playing BattleJuice Alchemist a bit. I skipped the tutorial level to showcase what the gameplay will actually be like. You can watch it over on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3gsKwSA0o
I actually enjoyed doing this quite a bit, maybe I can do it more often in the future.
The second video I want to share with you is an interview I gave for Fear Fest '22 this week, a games festival celebrating horror games of all sorts. Check it out if you really can't get enough of me rambling about BattleJuice Alchemist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXLlxgroTpk
Last but definitely not least, I have some wonderful personal news: I'm a dad now! Two weeks ago our little son was born. He and his mom are well and we are simply over the moon.
That's all for now, enjoy your weekend everybody!
Alain
New Gameplay Trailer
Hey everyone,
it was about time that I fired up Premiere Pro and made a new trailer. BattleJuice Alchemist has been overhauled on so many ends over the last months and so many things have been added that I almost felt bad not having that represented in a trailer. So without further ado, watch it on our Steam page:
Or in case you prefer all the 1440p glory watch it on YouTube:
I hope you enjoy it and continue sticking with me over the course of development!
Alain
New Gameplay Trailer
Hey everyone,
it was about time that I fired up Premiere Pro and made a new trailer. BattleJuice Alchemist has been overhauled on so many ends over the last months and so many things have been added that I almost felt bad not having that represented in a trailer. So without further ado, watch it on our Steam page:
Or in case you prefer all the 1440p glory watch it on YouTube:
I hope you enjoy it and continue sticking with me over the course of development!
Alain
Update: Patch Notes 0.20701
Hey everyone,
in the last devlog/preview post I already announced that I was working on a dash move. It is now done and you can try it out within the Steam alpha playtest! But this is not what this post here is mainly about. Today I want to give you some visual impressions of our creative process and ramble about Midjourney.
With the help of our art director and concept artist Felix I overhauled our starting town Caribou Creek. In times of AI generated imagery I have regularly seen the discussion come up, whether images from tools like Midjourney can replace a concept artist. Midjourney creates images that look a lot like concept art you see on ArtStation. Am I saying this is not concept art for a flaming octopus dagger?
In my opinion there is a common misconception of what concept artists do: create beautiful images. I'd say their job is to solve design problems. In deed, to communicate their solution they often create images. But if they can solve a design problem without creating a piece of visual art and simply explain to you on a call what the solution is, they perfectly accomplished their task.
So in this post I'd like to show you some concept art as a part of our production pipeline. It is not polished and would not be posted on ArtStation, but it did perfectly do the trick for us.
The first problem was that Caribou Creak missed a unique feeling. Felix decided that we needed crank up the occult vibe. It is a town rebuilt after an alchemical explosion. Not many people live there anymore, so it must be protected against the forces of evil by charms and straw guardians.
The second problem was that our alchemist's workshop, which is built into the former blacksmith's workshop, is the place the player spends most of the time and it was just not well thought out and "alchemical" enough, so Felix redesigned it.
Here is a montage of how things look after their implementation in game.
Charms:
Straw persons:
Alchemists workshop:
One of the reasons why I think Felix did an amazing job is that he took a close look at what assets we already had and he did his redesigns on the basis of that. He created designs that were tailor-made for our production. I am the only one making 3D models for the game at the moment and I could not spend weeks on this overhaul. At the stage where AI is right now, it can't take these production related circumstances into consideration.
I derailed these patch notes a bit, the full list of changes can be found on our Discord as always. I'd appreciate feedback and thoughts, especially thoughts on AI generated art, because I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
Cheers,
Alain
Update: Patch Notes 0.20701
Hey everyone,
in the last devlog/preview post I already announced that I was working on a dash move. It is now done and you can try it out within the Steam alpha playtest! But this is not what this post here is mainly about. Today I want to give you some visual impressions of our creative process and ramble about Midjourney.
With the help of our art director and concept artist Felix I overhauled our starting town Caribou Creek. In times of AI generated imagery I have regularly seen the discussion come up, whether images from tools like Midjourney can replace a concept artist. Midjourney creates images that look a lot like concept art you see on ArtStation. Am I saying this is not concept art for a flaming octopus dagger?
In my opinion there is a common misconception of what concept artists do: create beautiful images. I'd say their job is to solve design problems. In deed, to communicate their solution they often create images. But if they can solve a design problem without creating a piece of visual art and simply explain to you on a call what the solution is, they perfectly accomplished their task.
So in this post I'd like to show you some concept art as a part of our production pipeline. It is not polished and would not be posted on ArtStation, but it did perfectly do the trick for us.
The first problem was that Caribou Creak missed a unique feeling. Felix decided that we needed crank up the occult vibe. It is a town rebuilt after an alchemical explosion. Not many people live there anymore, so it must be protected against the forces of evil by charms and straw guardians.
The second problem was that our alchemist's workshop, which is built into the former blacksmith's workshop, is the place the player spends most of the time and it was just not well thought out and "alchemical" enough, so Felix redesigned it.
Here is a montage of how things look after their implementation in game.
Charms:
Straw persons:
Alchemists workshop:
One of the reasons why I think Felix did an amazing job is that he took a close look at what assets we already had and he did his redesigns on the basis of that. He created designs that were tailor-made for our production. I am the only one making 3D models for the game at the moment and I could not spend weeks on this overhaul. At the stage where AI is right now, it can't take these production related circumstances into consideration.
I derailed these patch notes a bit, the full list of changes can be found on our Discord as always. I'd appreciate feedback and thoughts, especially thoughts on AI generated art, because I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
Cheers,
Alain
DevLog: Preview on Dashing and Visual Changes
Hey everyone,
I'm glad you found your way to this corner of the internet to get a little sneak peak on what is coming with the next patch of the BattleJuice Alchemist alpha playtest.
For quite some time, enemies have been able to cut off your path by sprinting ahead of you. Now you can do the same by using your brand new dash move.
This might not seem too big of a deal, but it actually is one of the bigger changes in player mobility in a while. The dash move was not easy to figure out and might need some more testing. But I am already very happy with how it turned out. I had to decide how to tie it into resource management and level progression as well as the control schemes. I ended up with the default being right clicking or pressing the Juicify key.
As always there have been multiple minor changes and bug fixes, but there is one visual change that I would like to quickly show you. I changed the visual effect that determines how objects that occlude the vision onto your character are presented.
In the gif above you see how the camera behaves when you approach a building: it tilts to a steeper angle to make navigation easier. Also, note how when you enter the ground floor of the building, the second and third are not visible and when you move up to the second floor it becomes visible and only the third floor stays invisible. But that does not do us any good when we are not inside the building. That's why I added this circular cut-out effect, which I find pretty neat:
Let me know what you think and I hope you are looking forward to the next patch so you can dash around to your heart's content.
Thank you for sticking with me and have a great weekend!
Alain
DevLog: Preview on Dashing and Visual Changes
Hey everyone,
I'm glad you found your way to this corner of the internet to get a little sneak peak on what is coming with the next patch of the BattleJuice Alchemist alpha playtest.
For quite some time, enemies have been able to cut off your path by sprinting ahead of you. Now you can do the same by using your brand new dash move.
This might not seem too big of a deal, but it actually is one of the bigger changes in player mobility in a while. The dash move was not easy to figure out and might need some more testing. But I am already very happy with how it turned out. I had to decide how to tie it into resource management and level progression as well as the control schemes. I ended up with the default being right clicking or pressing the Juicify key.
As always there have been multiple minor changes and bug fixes, but there is one visual change that I would like to quickly show you. I changed the visual effect that determines how objects that occlude the vision onto your character are presented.
In the gif above you see how the camera behaves when you approach a building: it tilts to a steeper angle to make navigation easier. Also, note how when you enter the ground floor of the building, the second and third are not visible and when you move up to the second floor it becomes visible and only the third floor stays invisible. But that does not do us any good when we are not inside the building. That's why I added this circular cut-out effect, which I find pretty neat:
Let me know what you think and I hope you are looking forward to the next patch so you can dash around to your heart's content.
Thank you for sticking with me and have a great weekend!
Alain
Update: Patch Notes 0.20401
Hey everyone,
in the last patch I introduced some features that can help playing BattleJuice Alchemist despite difficulties with manual dexterity. Today I pushed patch 0.20401 to the public branch of the Steam playtest and I would like to talk a bit about the features helping out with visual accessibility.
I did not realize it at first and thought everything was fine with my flask UI, one of the most crtitcal UIs in the game.
That was until I checked screenshots with the help of Coblis, an online color blindness simulator. It is a great tool to get an impression of how people with different color vision handicaps perceive images. The most severe deficiency is monochromacy/achromatopsia, which means total color blindness. So let's take a look at that UI again:
Monochromacy and achromatopsia basically make the game unplayable. This also affects items within the inventory, wich you can see by looking at nine different flasks:
To fix this problem I added icons to all flasks and the UI. I categorized flasks into three groups by adding different basic outer icon shapes for resource flasks (drop), defensive flasks (shield) and offensive flasks (spiky circle/explosion) and a unique icon for each flask to unmistakably identify it. Here is the result:
Beside that, I made changes to UI elements in other places and hope the game is more accessible to quite a few people now.
In other news, I fixed bugs, overhauled item's affixes and worked on other mechanics. And to end with an exciting moving image, I overhauled the teleportation affix. I love not having to search for a town's entrance.
As always, if you want to read the full patch notes or just want to say hi, stop by on our Discord. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
Alain
Update: Patch Notes 0.20205
Hey everyone,
last week I sneakily pushed a patch for the open Steam playtest but did not have the time to properly tell you about it. Today I pushed another one, version 0.20205, and it is time to talk about it!
Some players were having trouble with aiming their shots in the game, so I thought about controls and accessibility a bit more. I implemented an aiming system that you can use with your mouse exclusively and without hotkeys.
To improve accessibility even more, I added inputs and changed settings as well as other things so you can now play the game completely without the keyboard. Hotkeys might still be the most efficient way to control your alchemist and nothing prevents you from playing the way you did before the patch.
In order to allow mouse-only play, I tweaked the ritual magic system. After burning a certain amount of a certain ingredient you have to chant a mantra, which was based on alphabetic letters. These letters are now replaced by runes, which can be clicked in a new UI, instead of typed with a keyboard. A second benefit from this is that the rune system makes it easier to translate the game into different languages. As a consequence of these changes, all quests and riddles related to ritual magic were overhauled, so there are new scrolls with visual riddles to figure out.
Next week I will add additional accessibility features, but also more content, so stay tuned for the upcoming devlog.
If you want to read the full patch notes or just want to say hi, stop by on our Discord. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
Alain
Update: Patch Notes 0.20205
Hey everyone,
last week I sneakily pushed a patch for the open Steam playtest but did not have the time to properly tell you about it. Today I pushed another one, version 0.20205, and it is time to talk about it!
Some players were having trouble with aiming their shots in the game, so I thought about controls and accessibility a bit more. I implemented an aiming system that you can use with your mouse exclusively and without hotkeys.
To improve accessibility even more, I added inputs and changed settings as well as other things so you can now play the game completely without the keyboard. Hotkeys might still be the most efficient way to control your alchemist and nothing prevents you from playing the way you did before the patch.
In order to allow mouse-only play, I tweaked the ritual magic system. After burning a certain amount of a certain ingredient you have to chant a mantra, which was based on alphabetic letters. These letters are now replaced by runes, which can be clicked in a new UI, instead of typed with a keyboard. A second benefit from this is that the rune system makes it easier to translate the game into different languages. As a consequence of these changes, all quests and riddles related to ritual magic were overhauled, so there are new scrolls with visual riddles to figure out.
Next week I will add additional accessibility features, but also more content, so stay tuned for the upcoming devlog.
If you want to read the full patch notes or just want to say hi, stop by on our Discord. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
