I’m not familiar with deck building rogue-likes. Could you give me a brief instructions?
Absolutely! I should update the description with some introductory instructions until I can get those sorts of "intro tutorial" steps into the actual gameplay.
The Alchemy Lab at the beginning allows you to take ingredients from the lab and move them around either on the table or into your ingredient bag inventory. You can select ingredient cards while they are on the table and try to craft a potion with them by pressing space bar. If a potion can be crafted with the combination of ingredient cards you have selected it will transform them into the potion and put it into your potion bag on the right automatically, otherwise right now it gives no feedback (will be added later for sure).
When you are ready you can leave the lab to go into combat where you will draw potion cards from your potion bag to play in combat. Each card has a blue number (the focus cost or FC to use this on your turn) and a yellow number (the number of charges you have left of this potion before it is empty). This whole system is subject to be revamped but its just a simple way to do damage to the "enemy square" for right now as a prototyping step.
Defeating the enemy will bring you to a rewards screen where you can select 2 new ingredient cards to add to your ingredient bag and then take you to an alchemy table.
The alchemy table functions much like the alchemy lab with the exception that you only have access to the ingredients in your ingredients bag rather than your full laboratory at home. You can choose to craft new potions OR you can click on potions in your inventory on the right to refill them, potions only have a set number of charges before they need to be refilled or that card becomes deadweight in your deck.
The game lacks a feature to help you learn these mechanics right now so here is a reference cheat sheet so you can get started.
All potions right now are combos of one "bottle" and two of any single element. (IE, 1 bottle, 2 fire / 1 bottle, 2 earth / etc.)
Most potions do some amount of damage but that is not listed on the cards. The only exception is the water potion heals you for 2 hp.
I hope this helps and I appreciate you taking the time to playtest the game even if it is super unclear how to play it currently. Any experiential challenges you encounter with learning the game are valuable feedback that will help me implement ways to make the game more intuitive for new players.