I finished the demo on hard.

Most of my time and runs were spent on trying to figure out if there could be a better key bindings.

Taking fingers off movement keys to change chemicals is not ideal. I have a mouse with extra buttons, which made the game easier.

I gotta say the game doesn’t really force me to switch chemicals mid-combat. I don’t think my Magicka Wizard Wars exp really translates to Alchemical. There are many status effects and chemical combos that don’t feel that useful, but that might be because the game does not have that many enemies, and you just have them ready for later.

Pretty much all enemies are weak against corrosive damage (given they are robots), and given fire also mixes with that, I need to go with freezing. Two corrosive and two freezing killed fire watcher enemies in one shots, and fire mines in two shots. Electrical watchers and other mines needed 3 and 2 shots. I could switch to different chemicals with fire against them, but honestly given the tricky control scheme, I found it easier to just shoot multiple times instead.

I tried melee only runs, but timing on dodging exploding enemies was too tricky for me.

I think a good practice is clearing exploding fire barrels before entering combat rooms. Leaving them is way too risky just to get environmental kills. If that is not how you want players to play, then I guess you could spawn barrels together with enemies.

I think the game would be better if the camera was more farther away. I would like to be able to see more enemies on screen. Many rooms felt too small for all the action and barrels.

As for improving controls, I have already mentioned on the inner council stream how a modifier key for different chemical row could lower the number of necessary keys. I also think it would be a good idea to limit chemicals to 3 slots rather than 5 (not counting combos), that is one of the changes that Wizard Wars made to the original Magicka to make the game more fast-paced and I think it worked very well.

I experienced some fps drops the first few times when using chemicals/destroying barrels. I imagine it is caused by you instantiating things before you pool them. I think it would be beneficial to pre-instantiate some more used game objects into your pools at dungeon generation.

Bug Report:

I think I found a bug, or at least I think it is not how it should work:

>Make Steam with Water and Fire

>Add Plasma

>Cancel them out with Freeze

>Add Plasma for testing

you are back with 1 Plasma Chemical that still costs water and fire and freeze, because cancelling steam with freeze does not clear them properly.

Cool game bro, here's a stream:

Hitting numbers keys multiple times to charge up feels cool, but it's also a bit tiring when you're going back and forth between elements. And it's specially annoying to hit 5 and 6, you pretty much have to stop moving. Another thing is, I usually just went for full charges and just mashed the number keys. But often I wasn't sure of if I hit it 3 or 4 times. For these reasons, I personally would prefer if there were 3 charges, or even 2, that would make it feel less annoying input wise for me.

I didn't figure out any complex combinations. I eventually figured out that Fire and Ice were weak points of some of the enemies, so my strategy was just to full charge them individually to deal with them. After a few runs I figured out that I could heal myself. And that's about it. But I liked the exploratory part of figuring that out (helped by the manual).

I would have liked a sort of training room with dummies or something to test stuff out. I like to experiment with mechanics normally, but I don't feel like you have too much room to try out stuff while you're fighting against dudes in the wild.

But at any rate, it feels pretty nice when you manage to do what you want in this game, it's super tight. I also felt like I learned new stuff after every run. And obviously, I bet it gets pretty nutty when you factor in chemical combinations. So yeah, pretty cool, looking forward to more updates!

First shot (tired) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2189925511

Second shot (caffeinated) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2192176647

I would describe this game as:

"Enter the Gungeon" but you start with all weapons unlocked except there are really complicated hotkeys to activate them. For example, to get my recommended weapon, you need to press TAB-1-5-5. When you are hit by a status effect, you need to press TAB-1-3-3-E, wait a bit, press E again. Also there are exploding barrels EVERYWHERE. Enemies are all orbs, many of them bullshit orbs that seek you out and explode, or otherwise explode on death.

So your game, in the first level, is already thrice as complicated as EtG:

- Gunplay/movement alone is more complex with all the barrels

- Status effects you have to clear from yourself

- Switching weapons is a minigame

Getting to the second level rewards you with: More of the same. I think the individual aspects are honestly fine (maybe fun), but it would really help if you focused on one gimmick alone. At least at the start. For all I care, have the final levels be super complex (like the first one is now). But for the first ones, honestly, my wish and expectation would be that there are e.g. some rats, and I should use fire/poison to kill them, and then some robots, and I should use electro to kill them. And these enemies alone be simpler than the first enemies you encounter in EtG.

It also feels very unrewarding right now to combo elements. The mental effort of e.g. first drenching and then electrocuting enemies... and then it does a puny 8 damage… I suppose it does more damage if I stack the elements higher; but the game really makes you hate stacking 3x-4x because then it takes like 4 seconds until you can shoot again. I suspect the stacking better be removed completely (or limited to 2x). And going drench->electro should INSTAGIB on the first level, else it’s ridiculously not worth the effort.

Misc:

- Zip comes with "DoNotShip" folder (Linux)

- Game crashed my GPU at first because framerate uncapped by default

- Killed orbs often look a lot like alive orbs because of the ''ragdoll'' effect

- The game is called Alchemickal but apparently we do not care about all the random colourful flasks lying around

- At first I thought you were supposed to clear current chemicals by activating the counter-chem. (Would only fit the overall complexity of this game.) Then I got stuck with two tier-3 chems, no clue how to clear them, can take one (very weak) shot every 5 seconds. You can see I figured it out after like a minute.

- Why do I want to kill the boss? Apparently it is not guarding the portal.

- Enemies on spawn become vulnerable too late

- The chests are a joke. I get a couple healing orbs (not even full health) when I can infinitely heal myself? No clue what scrap is for. At least make the chests always heal you to full; or put something actually exciting in them and let me do the healing myself.

- Can’t dash through enemies, but can oddly push them away by running against them (pristine unity slop)

Keep up the grind. Honestly the base idea with mixing the Chems is nice - it needs a lot more breathing room.

First time playing this game, I didn't read the games page so it was a truly blind experience.

I played in regular difficulty, at first I was lost, because I used my weapons and didn't deal too much damage, but then I realise the game was like magicka and start defeating the enemies. The melee weapon felt weaker compared to the gun, with the gun I just go for example: full ice and one shoot the fire drones plus it freeze enemies. A basic tutorial will be helpful, it doesn't matter if it's only text, it will help new player a lot.

This project looks promising so far and the visual effects are nice, no complains in that department, keep the good work.

your game's fucking sick.

it didn't click with me last time, but i watched it streamed and i saw a glimpse of the intricate systems behind it.

juice overload, too

VERY hard, but it's a good thing for this genre imho

Last time I played this you had to select elements with the radial menu, getting rid of it and allowing for a magicka-like real-time elements mixing feels a lot better to me.

Never quite clicked the same way as magicka, I think those robot enemies in cramped rooms don't allow the same degree of freedom.
Besides, having your attack dictated by your element reserves is much clunkier, you're constantly keeping an eye on the UI and it's distracting and limiting.

That being said once I developed a strategy, got in the rhythm and committed some combos to muscle memory it became easier and more fun.
Basically what I did for every room was start with steam ready, rust every enemy with the pistol giving priority to the suicide bombers, then alternating ice and fire, with some electricity mixed in if there were a lot of targets.
I also killed the watcher boss with the same strategy.
The silencing mix didn't seem to stop the watchers from attacking, the tar didn't feel worth the hassle just for some crowd control since the electrical thing does pretty much the same, I used acid on the watcher boss but it didn't seem like it did much of a difference.
If you were to take one element from magicka I would suggest the shield spell/element: being able to make your own cover would make the fights less dependent on random enemy and clutter spawn.

Also if there was a way to spend currency I didn't find it.

Basically the core is fun but the elemental stuff needs refining imo.
For example you could let the players do a normal attack when reserves are empty instead of forcing them to unload the mixture first.
I would also like something around your cursor indicating what elements you've selected so you don't have to look down at the UI every time.

Looking forward to play more of this, it's progressing nicely.