The life of a brilliant scientist can be hard. The mockery of your peers, who don't understand your vision. The propaganda of your rivals, trying to discredit your work. The unhealthy interest of the military in your little mutant excursions. And that thing when your hair is always a mess, no matter how many times you try to get them sorted. But some of us take the hardships of life as a challenge and face them head-on with a smile!
Difficulty levels in Creature Lab
Starting my experiments, I saw that my undoubted control of elements makes my work so much easier. When everything comes together as expected, I may focus on building up the bulk of my army. With an array of mass-produced mutagens, the military efforts seem to be just puny.
We wanted Creature Lab to be both accessible and challenging. That's why in the final game you will find three difficulty levels. The main difference between them lies in the chemistry and the interactions of the elements present in the substances you mix. To be more precise, the interactions of opposite elements are a key mechanic that will change between the difficulty levels - and also your capability of detecting the elements through analysis.
But sometimes, chemistry won't collaborate. It's not easy to identify elements previously unknown to mankind. It's challenging to test their interactions, at least without accidental explosions. One must be very, very careful. Even if people technically may live twice with my help.
On Normal difficulty, the opposite elements cancel themselves out but otherwise don't cause any harm. You can feed mutants with any potions (although those matching elements used to create it will be more effective), use any mutagens to grow limbs, and any potions to enhance the creature. The analysis of a substance under the microscope will always tell you exactly what elements it is composed of. On Hard difficulty, substance analysis changes significantly. Instead of one exact element, you get two possible elements. Only one is present in the mixture and you must figure out which one it is... by experimenting as a scientist would.
Frankly, I heard people calling me insane too many times. Yadda, Yadda, boring... But there are challenges for master biochemists that just cannot be described in other words. Insanity may be elementary here if you excuse a poor pun.
The truly twisted chemical challenge awaits you at Insane difficulty. Now opposite elements don't cancel themselves - using them in one mixture automatically results in unusable sludge (disgusting!). On Insane, you have to nourish and enhance mutants only with potions that don't have any elements opposite to the creature's elements. The same rule applies to making new limbs. In addition, the chemist's guessing game is even harder this time. Analyzing the substance gives you three possible elements of which it may be composed. You need to figure out which exactly is in there by mixing and matching. This boils down to mixing the substances/elixirs with the known elements in it with those with unknown elements. By their reaction, you can learn the composition of the latter. With opposites in mind, this may be a rather painstakingly difficult process.
And with this, we have reached the end of our 14th devlog. Now you should have an idea about how you can ramp up the challenge in the final version of Creature Lab. It's good to mention that all levels are described in detail So who'll be brave enough to tackle Insane? 😉
Remember that you can ask us directly about any of the features presented here via Discord:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1309990/Creature_Lab/