Ludum Dare 50: The Alchemist
You can play the game at: https://idaedalusi.itch.io/the-alchemist
The Alchemist was a game that I created with two other people during Ludum Dare 50.
The Alchemist is a realtime card game where you play as an alchemist who is scheduled to die. The player has to combine cards to brew potions to either drink or throw at Death
In this project I was sole designer, sole artist, and one of three programmers.
This game was created for Ludum Dare 50, which is a game jam that runs for just 72 hours.
Due to how short the time frame, it makes it very difficult to pivot if the design has a flaw with it in any way. Unfortunately about midway through the game jam I realized that the original design just wasn’t that fun. This was because the player wasn’t actually making any choices during gameplay.
So as a quick pivot I changed the design to have cards with multiple different effects depending on which number is highest.
This means that the player must juggle between healing themselves and decreasing Death’s damage or pushing Death away while trying to maintain enough cards to actually finish potions.
One way to maintain cards is to drink a potion that generates cards, however another way is the Draw button in the bottom left corner. Pressing the button gives the player one card and then goes on cooldown. Giving the player an additional thing to keep track of
This pivot worked well as we ended up placing in the top 12% of almost 3000 entries. Although with a little more time we could have balanced the game to be a bit more forgiving.