Hello everyone! We’re back with our third devlog, in which we are going to speak about Ways of Alchemy’s survival mechanics and how we figured out how to make it more interesting during the development.
To make our game and its story feel more vital — and to avoid it becoming just a puzzle game about matching potions and recipes — we decided to introduce survival elements that could lead to death. After all, there’s no better way to highlight the weight of your actions than by making the characters mortal. We settled on three core survival mechanics: Hunger, Energy and Scars.
Energy Won’t Break You
The most lenient mechanic is Energy – it simply slows you down by increasing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks. You have to be extremely tired to actually feel its pressure - penalties only begin once you reach 5 fatigue points. We didn't want our players to constantly need rest after performing basic chores!
Hunger Kills
Originally, the harshest mechanic used to be the Hunger – in early versions, when it reached zero, a character would die. If it were the Alchemist himself, that would be a game over screen.
Early internal playtest indicated that this is too hardcore for many players – we needed a more complicated system that punishes players not as harshly for their missteps. We found the solution in Scars mechanics.
Ways of Getting Scarred
Originally we made Scars for Adventurers to indicate how their failures affect them physically but possess a valuable experience for them:
- With every scar received during the unsuccessful adventure, an associated Pillar would grow for them, meaning they would have more chance to survive it in future adventures.
- However, the more scars they have, the higher the chance for them to die – every scar after a second scar poses the risk of death. Their survival would be a question of luck for them.
We implemented the same Scars mechanic into the existing Hunger mechanic – regular “fasting” will now lead to Veil Fresh Trauma for characters and inevitably kill them if they frequently starve. If your alchemist is so busy with alchemic life that he’s getting fourth trauma for Starvation, perhaps it will be better to start anew…
Alchemist doesn't go on deadly adventures and won't get scars from beasts and storms – adventurers will do the dirty work for him... And yet, he's not safe even from everyday misfortunes – home accidents are inevitable if you send him (instead of a hired hand) to deal with chores or unfinished business – beware of squirrels!
We wanted to provide Alchemist with an option to deal with troubles on his own, with the help of potions. And that’s how we came up with traumas.
Traumas And How To Heal Them
After the in-game failure, a character can now get traumatized. Luckily, in a short period, you can heal it with a potion. If it’s not healed quickly, a scar will appear.
Here’s how it works:
- All traumas and potions are based on five in-game pillars and you need to create a potion that belongs to a pillar that is the opposite of the trauma’s pillar. For example, Song Potion will heal the Veil Trauma.
- This potion’s level must be higher than the level of trauma a character received.
However, there’s always a place for improvement: we received feedback from players showing that they want to be able to treat scars as well as traumas: after all, it takes a particularly prepared alchemist with potions for all possible occasions to react to traumas quickly and avoid scarring.
And yet, we don’t want to make it too easy and consequence-free, to completely remove the importance of human lives from the game – we feel as if people will put their alchemist in danger too often, making a lot of challenging game aspects (like meeting the Inquisitor) too trivial…
Let us know what you think about this dilemma: how do you feel about the difficulty and scars mechanics in Ways of Alchemy?