Hi, and welcome to the fourth devlog! Today’s topic is Adventures: we talk about expanding our world’s borders with simple names of the places and how thoughtful preparation, along with a properly picked potion, helps you to save the lives of your hired hands.
🚀 Don’t forget: a free demo is available if you haven’t tried it yet! As we’re putting the final touches on the game and preparing for the release, we’d love to hear our players’ feedback to ensure we won’t miss anything significant!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3519740/Ways_of_Alchemy_Demo/
⚔️ How Adventures Affected Our Game: Enhancing Potion Mechanics and Expanding the Game’s World
Adventure is the lifeblood of fantasy games – hardly anyone is going to argue with that! But what do adventures have to do with alchemy? And why did we make a big part of the game out of it?
Adventures allowed us to achieve several things: first is to add a practical layer of meaning to potions you brew. Now, you don’t just sell them – you use them while your hired hands go on adventures, to help them overcome monsters who secure the treasure cave!
And the second thing is… a bit more complex than that. Let’s talk about it in detail.
There are many places you can go to, and some of them sound so tempting and alluring. What will await you in Singing Valleys? Will these songs be deadly?
🌍 How We Enhanced Worldbuilding With Intriguing Adventures’ Names And Made Singing Valleys Truly Sing In Your Head
Adventures also helped us to expand the game’s world and make it wider and richer with details. As soon as you hear about the “Singing Valleys”, you start thinking about this place and its location, expanding the gaming realm in your head. A magical place where you can find people with canine heads – located beyond the forest, beyond the hills and mountains.
In this context, our Alchemist stops being your friendly local witch doctor and turns into a mysterious sage, possessing knowledge of lands far away, breaking the ancient seals, gaining forbidden knowledge not only from the human psyche but also from old sanctuaries.
Will it be enough for an adventure? Probably, but an extra potion to use when a challenge comes won’t hurt!
🧪 Two Ways Of Using Potions: Drinking and Throwing
Since Adventures originated with the alchemic decisions in mind, potions ended up having not one, but two usages. We liked the idea of “a power-up” for the adventurer: picture him drinking a potion, his pupils expanding, and him coming to deal with the monster in the cave! But we also liked that a potion can be thrown at the monster. Both of these are ways of dealing with dangers in the style of alchemy.
A drinking potion will enhance the adventurer’s abilities. Potion of Rage may sound scary, but it will make your adventurer incredibly powerful.
🎯 Two Paths to Success: Preparing or Taking Risks
As a result, at the beginning of the adventure, we show our players what kind of pillars they will require so that they can prepare adventurers by giving them a potion to “power up” and equipping them with artifacts. And then, in the process of ongoing adventure, players will have the option to use a different potion for the additional bonus in dealing with challenges.
- The first method is pretty effective: you spend one potion per adventure and “brute force” the adventures – either you get lucky or don’t, depending on the difficulty of the challenge.
- The second method requires more potions for each new challenge (up to four in each adventure! – quite a lot), but guarantees the successful results, even if you send a weak peasant to deal with the most cursed temples of them all. This also shows the power of the Alchemist quite well: if he takes preparation seriously, he becomes unstoppable.
As you prepare to go on an adventure, you can choose whatever may work and help. Approach it with careful thought!
☠️ The Price of Careless Preparation: Extra Cost & Scars
This preparation mechanic turned out to be the most demanding in the whole game. It’s not too complex, yet it has a lot of negative consequences. A wrong recipe doesn’t lead to wasting ingredients – you simply cannot do it. But wrong, mindless preparation for adventures spends your coins, food and even scars the adventurer (we wrote a post about it recently – check it out).
We think we managed to create dangerous and risky adventures exactly how they should be – well, risky and dangerous. And yet, we still worry a lot about getting this aspect of our game right.
First scar after one of the adventures that went wrong. One more scar – and you start playing with death.
Risk Or Safety – It’s Up To You! Choose Between High Stakes and Thoughtful Preparations
What do you think? Is it fun and engaging for you, the players, to risk as you venture towards the adventures? Or perhaps the fool-proof (you can start the expedition only if your preparation is strong enough) method would work better? Your ideas are more than welcome! And if you haven’t tried the demo, give it a go!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3519740/Ways_of_Alchemy_Demo/