Life is busy these days, with side projects, an awesome baby, and working on the power-up economy while also trying to get the documentation in order.  I’ve also gotten some great sound effects from Nick Friedemann for the elemental effects, so I’ll be posting up previews of those soon.  If anyone has great resources on game design documentation organization, I’d be thrilled, because though I love google docs, it’s very hard to navigate large and complex documents (and Alchementrix’s design doc is growing still). 

Finally getting back to work on a really fun aspect of Alchementrix:  the power-ups.  Here we have the rebuild of Moorewick’s Mechanickal Mangler, a giant drill piece capable of tearing through an entire column of tiles in half a second.

One of the primary aspects of the power-ups is balancing orderly effects against chaotic; the demo version will ship with 4 power-ups.  The mangler, an explosive called Grenado, and a pair of others we’ll talk about later.

The mangler you see here is powered by Steam, which is drawn from the player’s reserves of water and fire.  The mangler is a quick way to destroy a column of tiles, but it won’t return gold from stone tiles, so the player has to balance that predictability against profits.

Refining the proportions of the user interface to give every possible pixel to the tile area in the middle; also working on the tile containers.  And the text area, and the placement of meters, and pretty much everything else too

I’m considering taking the project to Kickstarter – with the user generated puzzles and the power-ups, I know I’ll need help on the back-end and balancing at the very least; coupled with my need for a c# collaborator, and it’s just unavoidable that I’ll need to purchase some assistance in the near future.  If anyone has suggestions and advice regarding that process, please drop me a line!

Working on some of the basic puzzles for Alchementrix’s alpha version;  here’s one consisting of iron boxes which prevent the stones (just destroyed, they start in the middle) from moving around – you’ll have to risk piling on top of it and getting a down-ward facing reaction (water or acid), or, try to stack up a fire reaction from below.  Coupled with a tight time limit, it’s challenging but easily understandable – and there’s a lot to be said for reducing the cost of player failure.  If a player can resume gameplay quickly, they’re more likely to continue playing, play in smaller, frequent bursts, and to progress instead of getting stuck in a difficult part.  Click the image for a view of the game at 1920×1080.

I need to remodel the iron boxes and figure out why unity is creating a halo on the transparent parts, but seeing them working in game is gratifying.  The iron box is simple, but the concept that it brought – non-reactive utility tiles – has given a lot of flexibility towards puzzle building, and we’re looking forward on expanding that with the 3 others – each with unique, game expanding behavior.  As iron prevents tiles from touching, and reacting, the remainder modify the game’s rules in a similar manner, by reducing reaction costs, pausing a reaction until prompted, or redirecting a reaction’s effects.

Also, I’ve started the first steps towards getting music into this build, and even though it’s just a single track, Mike’s gameplay music adds a ton of rhythm to the game.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get the menu and other tracks from Brian and sound effects into the game soon.  Fun times!

Click the image below to load the unity scene in your browser; use the 1-7 keys to cycle through the various bits (#’s at the top of the keyboard, not the number pad).

Hopefully this will add more character to the UI;  the way parts of the machine animate is important not just to illustrating the giant-machine-as-user-interface, but also to provide feedback.  As time runs down on the clock, gears and cogs rotate faster;  if the player is about to game-over for a metrics (failed to save 5 fire tiles in a puzzle, for example) failure, those same gears wobble and oscillate.  Hopefully we’ll figure out a way to make the entire UI provide feedback; for the moment, it’s just a matter of creating patterns and tempo with the way things appear and disappear on the screen.

The other thing:  I’m looking for an experienced c# / unity developer to collaborate with – both to finish Alchementrix and pursue other projects – if you know anyone talented, please have them take a look and contact me if they’re interested.  Thanks!