Hey, thanks a lot for playing again.
I feel like DoTs are still just as strong against you as before, now they're just less prevalent and you have more opportunity to negate them somewhat with healing barrels, but you're still left of the mercy of the map generation.
Maybe they are too strong, but I think this issue comes down to a lack of communication between the game and the player (which is what most issues boil down to.) You can cure almost any debuff immediately by splashing yourself with the right chemicals, e.g. water extinguishes burn and antidote (healing + water) cures poison, so making debuffs very dangerous makes sense to me: it encourages the player to actively try to get rid of them instead of waiting for them to run their course. However, since the game does not tell you what cures what, most players think that letting the debuffs wear off with time is the only option! If I make a good tutorial that teaches people how this works, I believe you'll think debuffs are much more manageable. I'll still try to tweak the numbers a little bit.
Even with the slow-down, doing alchemy mid-combat kinda messes up the pace of the game - I'd prefer having something like quickslots where you can pre-define mixtures instead of always having to clear and then re-mix when you want to change your damage type.
I agree that quickslots could be beneficial for quality of life and I'll most likely implement them, but I don't see a future where I change the base alchemy menu. It's too integral to the game, the point of the game is mixing unique combinations for specific situations on the fly, which is something that quickslots cannot perform on their own. There's also the possibility of a Magicka-style system where you press keys to mix stuff in real-time without a menu taking up your screen, but I don't think that would work either due to two reasons:
- Magicka uses A, S, D, F, Q, W, E, and R for mixing—most of these keys are dedicated to basic controls in Alchemickal, so I would have to resort to number keys. To use number keys, one has to take their hand off WASD, meaning they become a sitting duck. Unless there's some very heavy time slow-down, this will be a problem.
- Magicka only has 2 or 3 "product elements," i.e. elements that you create by combining other elements. Alchemickal already has 4 and will have many more, since combining stuff is the point of the game. This means it would be very hard to keep track of what's happening in a Magicka-style menu, especially when you consider that some product chemicals are created from other product chemicals.
Only found two bugs in the demi: when you die, the player character's cape kinda "freezes" and moves almost detached from the character during ragdoll, and when you open the mix menu quickly after starting a run the camera can glitch out (which can vary between just going slightly-off center to moving down into the floor and keep going in the blackness below).
Noted, I'll take a look at those.