Alchemy for the Devil is a transformation themed deduction game, inspired by Potion Lab, Corruption of Champions and the board game Alchemists. The game currently includes the following themes: transformation, genderswap, mental changes.
As of version 0.06, there are two challenges, which can lead to several endings depending on your choices and success or failure.
Any comments or suggestions are welcomed and appreciated.
EC
V0.06:
- Added ability to skip introduction and tutorial
- Added ability to tweak your ideal body and mind
- Added ability to make your own notes
- More options for releasing creatures
- A ‘final’ test on your knowledge after passing the first test (more to be added later)
- New possible endings (mostly tied to the new challenge)
- Various typo and bug fixes
As it currently stands, even though the game is listed as "alpha" it is more a proof of concept than anything else.
At first the potion-making mechanics baffled me, as I was incapable of making heads or tails of it. That's because I was expecting complexity, while the actual system is extremely simplistic.
For starters, the only difference between a "successful" and an "unsuccessful" potion is that successful potions turn the parts affected human. What parts are affected is determined solely by which components are used, and if you use two different compotents the one affected is chosen at random and the actual effect is also completely random. That's what confused me, since there's no rhyme or reason to the transormations and two potions with the exact same components can have wildly different effects. Turns out that two different components do not interact with each other in any way whatsoever, so the best strategy is to mix two identical components, which accurately gives you which part such component affects
If the game, as it hints at, wants to include specific requests the system would have to be completely reworked because, as it stands, it's literally impossible to brew a potion with a specific transformation in mind.
Well, there isn't a ton here just yet, I like what I see. For those wondering about playing, well, I'd say give it a test and leave some feedback since review wouldn't really be fair to what's here right now...
To the author, I'd like to leave these thoughts:
Requiring potions to be in perfect pairs of three categories seems too much. You might want to consider limiting that to two out of three. Anti-Toxic/Toxis, Highly Reactive/Poorly Reactive, and being the same Grade is really asking too much and doesn't seem like it'll make that many potions in the long run. If I had to pick one, I'd say make Grade able to be anything but perhaps affect the amount of change in the outcome.
Additionally, like Sudoku, you can figure out some of the answers by what you already know. If you've got G1/HR and G1/PR in the current setup known and you put those two together and get a random, you should be able to add your own personal notes to the information, perhaps denoted in another color? This would be a way to keep track of that which you don't know for certain but are assuming to be true to help you with your own potion notes.
Lastly, being able to order the past potion attempts columns or search for results by one or more variable/ingrediants would also help with the science of figuring out what potions do what. You should probably also save aside known successes in case the player wants to call up just those. I know, you could just keep track of this stuff yourself, but that's far less fun or helpful than the game doing it for you.
Anywho, like I said... I like what I see, but what I see does have some issues, in my opinion.
It was a lot of work to figure out everything currently in the game, requiring a detailed excel sheet. At least, I think I have all the current mechanics figured out, and how they apply to my random generation.
I highly reccomend setting up an excel sheet early if you want it to not be as much of a trouble (a 16x16 table plus another 16x2, which should be able to hold all the information you need).
After all that, the end was very anti-climactic. I can only hope that later versions add things to make my effort worthwhile. Until then, I'm not sure that I would be able to reccomend this game. The concept and mechanics seem good enough, but development simply isn't far enough along.