Two months ago, we shared our first devlog for Elixir Emporium — but the journey began nearly two years ago. All that passion and hard work has led us to this exciting moment:
Elixir Emporium’s demo is now available here on Steam!
In this demo, you’ll play as a traveling alchemist with a unique ability: you can combine any two items into something brand new — like, really brand new: your alchemy generates new game data and injects brand-new items and crafting recipes into the game. You can combine anything, and even we the developers don’t know what you’ll end up crafting!
As you venture out into the world, you’ll quickly notice that any item you craft also becomes a way to interact with your surroundings in unexpected ways. Harvesting from any object in the world also creates new game data, so don’t be afraid to see what you get when you use a fishing rod on that tree.
You’ll also encounter strangers throughout the world. They don’t follow a script; they actually have AI “brains” that constantly analyze their surroundings and their memories — and make their own decisions on what they want to do. Talking to an NPC is one way for them to form new memories, giving you an interesting ability to influence NPC decision-making.
These NPCs also have the ability to reflect on their life in the game and identify problems they’re having — and they’ll convert these revelations into dynamic quests for the player. Each quest is unique and based on the evolving game world, and we use a logic engine that lets you solve open-ended quests however you want — as long as your solution makes sense.
There are many, many more systems to build for the game (dungeons, combat, and trading all come to mind!) but we hope this demo gives you a glimpse into the kind of game we’re building.
We would love to hear your feedback, your questions, your comments, your suggestions, and your experiences. Elixir Emporium has been fun to work on (so far!), but it’s been even more fun to play. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have!
See you in game!