Posted March 08, 2026 by Jackeea
Frustrated at my attempts to make a Minion Masters/Clash Royale clone a few weeks ago (which stalled because man, graphics are hard), I decided to pivot to something less graphically intensive - a tile matching game with an alchemical theming. (The Opus Magnum DLC kept this idea fresh in my mind).
I also really like the concept of "well, if you combine earth and air, you get sand. that's obvious." The first compounds to be made were the six combinations of he four basic elements, then the Wikipedia page for "List of alchemical substances" became my best friend. There's currently 70 compounds and 68 spells, which would result in 4,760 total cards (if all permutations were allowed; they aren't).
I started this on Monday 2nd, and while browsing bluesky - came across a post talking about 7drl. A splash of serendipity! An actual deadline! Just the spurring on I needed to stumble over myself and finish this.
I didn't have much of an idea at the start: just "there's "place compounds" cards, and somehow you cast spells." Cards are going to be fully pictoral - I yoinked the Cobalt Core method of arranging cards where instead of saying "Transmute Earth into Air. Draw a card." it says "🜃 -> 🜁, ■+1". This ensures that cards will be simple enough that I won't be encouraged to scope creep some crazy effect in there.
I couldn't get tooltips working. Eh, you'll figure it out. I hope.
I didn't want there to be "turns" per se, like most DBRLs do. I wanted each card to represent one "action", and each action counted down the opponent's timer for performing their next move. Run out of cards in your hand? Draw a new hand if you waste 5 actions. It works! As for casting spells, I was considering a Puzzle Quest-esque "you have a selection of spells on the side, and if you can match them to items on the board, do a thing" dealio. This felt... repetitive. So it didn't survive the night - after getting a very basic framework done on the first day, I had the idea of "what if cards did BOTH???"
I still had no idea how to balance anything or format anything. Wow, match three Fire in a row for big damage, that seems doable! Four Air in a T shape, brilliant. How many symbols do you expect to get in a run? I think after 10 goldfished "okay, I haven't been able to cast any spell with 4 or more symbols", I realized that I needed to actually start thinking about balance. Balance is hard.
I eventually settled on a starting deck that didn't brick and could reasonably beat a 20 health enemy in 1 round, after about 5 iterations of throwing stuff at the wall. I started adding some enemies; every run starts with a practice dummy (who still hits reasonably hard!) so you can get your bearings, and ends with a challenging dragon fight. Half the enemies are stickmen, the other half are geometric shapes. (Graphics are hard, sue me)
I realized that there wasn't too much variety, so took a leaf out of Minion Masters' book - you can't skip rewards, and you get 2 cards per reward. So by the end of the run, your deck is ~50% starter cards, 25% common cards, and the rest are uncommons/rares you decided to pick up. Rarity mainly just refers to how complicated the card is. Fire and Water? That's just Ethanol. 2 Fire and 2 Water in a checkerboard pattern? That's Aqua Vitae, and it's uncommon. 3 Fire and 3 Water surrounding a central Sulfur? That's Sweetened Vitriol, which apparently is a Severance reference too. I didn't have the time to put as many dumb references in here as I'd have liked, but there's still a few.
Then, Slay the Spire 2 came out. I soldiered on. I played a little bit. It was good. I felt the deadline approaching, but was pretty confident with my progress. I decided what to cut from my (extremely overambitious) original ideas - a third, totally new "class" of elements, modern elements with an alchemical twist, like Uranium or Silicon. I decided against adding events, or shops, or gold, or XP, or... anything. Fight -> rewards -> fight -> rewards was going to be the game loop. I was paring everything down to create a solid game loop. I realized that with all this simplification, I had a little extra time.
I had a stupid idea to add multiple characters.
This was Friday, the game wasn't even balanced around one character! But with the idea of "flesh it out a bit" stuck in my head, and my brain still thinking about Opus Magnum - I kind of wished there was a character that delved into the six metals of antiquity, from lead to gold. They'd start with lead, and "upgrade" it over time to stronger stuff. The existing work could be shunted to a character called Stella, and I'd add a new character with a (mostly) new item pool .
So, I stuck at it. Opus Magnum has you just add a Mercury to a metal to upgrade it, but I wanted this to be more alchemically accurate! The sulfur-mercury theory of metals says that metals are formed from the mixing of sulfur and mercury - so here, you surround a metal with 1 sulfur and 1 mercury, and it upgrades (and you draw a card for your trouble). Cool! Balancing this was a nightmare - I have about three different "idea2_good.json" files - but Barran was eventually done. (No idea where these names came from.)
Yesterday, I thought to myself "well, Opus Magnum does give you another way to upgrade metals..."
By combining two identical metals together, you get the next metal. This is inefficient, but straightforward - all you need is a crapload of Lead, and you can eventually turn it into Gold. At this point I'd basically added everything else I wanted to the game - I couldn't think of any other enemy designs, I'd added most every compound I wanted, so I thought "screw it, add a third".
"Scraps" broke my brain to balance. The issue is that if you have 5 pieces of Lead, then Barran can turn those into Tin->Iron->Copper->Silver-> Gold. Scraps, on the other hand, goes 4xLead -> 2xTin -> 1xIron, which is uh... not great. Eventually I came to the conclusion that Scraps' spells generally shouldn't "consume" metals, but should "demote" them. So his main attack turns an Iron back into a Tin for some damage. That way, you need to get an engine going where you can dump Tin onto the board, upgrade it, downgrade it, and balance that with the other spells they get. I'm proud of how they play, they've got some interesting dynamics while generally staying far away from the basic four elements.
I started playtesting today and found approximately 1 gazillion bugs.
The win screen didn't work, the animations bugged out, the characters' images didn't display on desktop, some of the spells were broken, the game hard crashed if you tried to draw a card at the same time you defeated the enemy, one of the two softlock detection systems didn't work. Aaaaaaaah.
5 hours of work later - here we are.
I'm proud of this! It's unpolished, the graphics are barely considered placeholder-y, I'm not sure Barran survived the existence of Scraps cannibalizing some of his item pool, I wish I could have added more enemies, there's no sound - but if you can look past that, it's a fun game.
Maybe I'll do more with this in future. I'm just glad to have gotten it done!