Your eyes do not deceive you: the video game known as Alchemickal, pronounced /alˈkemək(ə)l/, finally has a tutorial. Long gone are the days of streamers having a convenient excuse for not surviving more than 30 seconds per run! In all seriousness, I've been working on the game diligently since v0.140, this devlog will cover the fruits of my labor.

Tutorial

The game now has a full tutorial that players must complete upon starting the game. Figuring out the most concise way to introduce the game's mechanics was challenging but fun—most people don't read anything longer than a sentence, you can imagine the difficulty in explaining a quirky game like this one. There's not much else for me to say regarding the tutorial, the fact it even exists is awe-inspiring enough.

Alchemy Input

This marks the third and final iteration of the alchemy control scheme... for real, this time. While the number key mixing works relatively well, it has a few flaws that are hard to overlook, most notably a lack of ergonomics. The bottom row of chemicals is bound to keys that are farther away than the top row, making it harder to access without either taking your hand off WASD or uncomfortably stretching across the keyboard. Not only that, the number keys add a lot of inputs for the player to memorize and keep in mind.  

Luckily for me, the wonderful WebCough, creator of Goblin Resort, proposed a new scheme: RMB is a dedicated mixing key that, upon being held, overrides Q/W/E/A/S/D for alchemy operations. It sounds a little weird and esoteric on paper but he and I found that it works much better than the previous system, as it requires the least amount of hand-moving while having no major downsides. It *does* disable your ability to move with WASD while mixing, but this is fairly inconsequential since you couldn't really move while mixing with the old control scheme either. As a matter of fact, I like that you can't move while mixing! It encourages players to either be quick with their alchemy or learn to take cover  before making a complex mixture.

Weapon Upgrades

If you read the previous devlog then you might recall me discussing the idea of in-run progression through upgrades and buffs. Well, here's half of that promise! The player now has access to the weapon upgrades menu, which they can open at any time during a run (even in the middle of combat). Here, the player can spend their scrap to purchase upgrades for their equipped weapons. Every weapon has a unique upgrade tree, and the player can only purchase one upgrade per tier.

The idea behind weapon upgrades is not to merely boost the player's stats but to provide ways to create unique playstyles. Most upgrades modify or add to the behavior of your equipment in drastic ways: for example, the first upgrade tier of the revolver secondary provides a choice between Magnum Rounds and Burst Fire, two opposing upgrades that change how the weapon works at its core. There are some fun things you can achieve with certain builds, I'm eager to see people discover and create their own playstyles. 

Lighting Overhaul

I've received a significant amount of feedback on the game being too dark, and somehow I only came to my senses recently. My cowardly excuse is that my laptop has a very vibrant and bright screen, it wasn't until I went back to developing on my desktop that I realized just how dim the game's lighting is. Everything is brighter and more saturated now, hopefully yielding better visual clarity.

Gameplay Balancing

I've tweaked all sorts of gameplay values since v0.140, most notably damage weaknesses and spawn credits: enemies have more extreme weaknesses and spawn in smaller quantities now. That being said, the game now ramps up enemy credits as you progress through a dungeon, meaning that floor 3 should have more enemies than floor 1. 

On that note, enemy spawn waves are now on a timer: if you take too long to defeat the first wave in a combat room, the second wave will begin spawning after a set amount of time. This incentivizes you to work fast and not camp around, lest you get swarmed. The duration of the timers is dependent on difficulty, meaning they're very generous on Easy and incredibly brief on Hard—sometimes you get two waves at once regardless of how fast you go.

The poison clouds left behind by poisonous Mines are now combustible and explode upon being hit by fire. This doubles as both a way to get rid of a threat and as a means to inflict extra damage on enemies. I also added a freezing variant of the Watcher enemy. It's the same size as the blazing Watcher but is nimbler, shoots faster, but packs less of a punch and has less health. A horde of them might not kill you outright, but they can freeze you in place and leave you vulnerable to other enemies.

Enemies have always been able to infight, but this should happen more frequently and with greater clarity now. There is a unique status effect icon for when an enemy is "enraged" and begins fighting one of its kind.

Finally, the player can now continuously use their weapons by holding down inputs. Their camera is also higher up, giving the player a wider view of the battlefield.

Closing Thoughts

Other than a lot of bug fixing and some light optimization work, that's all she wrote for this update. There are only two things I want to implement before delving into the content grind: the player buffs mechanic and achievements/unlocks. With these two complete, the game will be 95% feature complete, I'll just have to make a bunch of enemies/environments/weapons/buffs. I can almost guarantee that these two features will be complete by v0.160, whether any new content will be in is anyone's guess. 

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy what the game has to offer in its current state. If you're interested in the game and haven't joined its Discord server already, please consider doing so. Until next time!