Alchemiisa Devlog #1

Alchemiisa Devlog #1

After spending some time thinking about life, death, and bucket lists, I came up with two most important projects aside from my family: visiting Japan and launching a game. I won’t spend your precious time on weeboing about Japan, but I could talk a bit about launching a game. Being a creative person, I want to leave something artistic behind before my time is over. Since time is a fragile concept, waiting for too long is not the wisest choice. Therefore, I have now decided to put some more effort into finishing a game at some point in my life. A game also acts as a perfect medium to compose some music, which I would also love to try and do properly.

Game development has been my on/off hobby since my introduction to programming at university. I have created some prototypes and participated in many game jams, but I would like to release something once and for all. Since I do have a lot of ideas of what to try out, I conducted minor market research before diving into the next project. I was debating between a deckbuilder and a ‘Bindings of Isaac’ clone. While the former would be better from a sales perspective, I feel that with a roguelite game, I can gather more support from my surroundings. First of all, countless co-op hours into ‘Bindings of Isaac’ make me an expert in this field, right? Aside from that, I have a friend who also has a huge amount of hours in that game, and he is also interested in releasing a game. He has been creating good-looking pixel art for many years in game jams, and in a sense, this sounds like a good match we could go for together. Aside from that, my wife is a huge inspiration for the key mechanic of the game: crafting. I feel that having her enthusiasm about crafting games will prove to be fruitful when designing systems and playtesting a prototype.

Spending time on game development with a full-time job and a family of four is certainly not an easy combination. I plan to drop to 80% work hours and work on this game for one day a week. While that will be very slow, there is a chance that a few other game jammer friends will join this project as soon as we can convince them that this will be a good project to contribute to. Writing this devlog is also one way to try to get more commitment from my side. If there’s anyone reading this, I can’t let you down and give up!

This post is now the first reference to a game that I truly hope to release sometime. Thank you for reading this far; I will now present to you the key idea and how we got started. The working title of the game is ‘Alchemiisa,’ and as mentioned above, it’s a clone of ‘Bindings of Isaac’, a top-down action roguelite game. We try to take a bit of a different take on the itemization, and drops consist mostly of crafting materials that players can use to support the chosen strategy to complete the run. Perhaps some artifacts will skew the odds of succeeding with a specific build better than others. Storywise, the game is about Miisa, a Nordic alchemist who has made an eldritch pact that can be reversed by searching for the fifth element and unlocking its secrets. Key points in the game are to provide a randomly generated experience where you can create stability amidst the chaos by creating your own luck. I want the story to contain some emotional, maybe even tragic elements, but I don’t want players to be forced to read much or deeply involve themselves with the story. It’s there to support the overall feeling of the game and give meaning to players’ actions, but it shall not clash with the smooth, action-packed roguelite experience. I will not go into too much detail here, as these are all subjects to change and perhaps each worth its own blog post entry.

For now, the almost empty git repository contains coding guidelines and a one-liner top-down character controller. Godot is the chosen engine (version 4.2.1 when writing this), mostly because we favor open-source tools, and using Godot was somewhat smooth in the last game jam. Unity would still probably be better if one were to target a job in the game industry, but that’s not on our menu. The next steps would be to clarify the crafting mechanics (which will probably be the content of the next post) and slowly start with a prototype of a room and some kind of enemy. We should first target a working prototype to test the mechanics. Over time, this devlog will reflect our choices and design changes throughout the time. If the prototype doesn’t work for us, then I would hope that I have the energy to start a devlog for the next project.

Here’s our first concept art from the artist!

Alchemiisa early concept art

Thank you for reading this, see you in next chapter!