Alchemysterious by PatateNouille
Stabilize the Philosopher Stone. Search through an old alchemy lab to find clues and ingredients to follow a long forgotten recipe. Solve riddles, understand the hints and unlock objects using The Room's style of tactile interactions.

↓ ATTENTION ↓
The Jam Version is really messed up, and cannot be completed
but we just released a completely reworked V2 on itch ! See the download link under !
There's still a few issues we could not fix in time, but the game is definitely much better (it can be finished this time)
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| Jam Build | https://mega.nz/file/c9JkQJKZ#wIj0O-72uw_U4LblnVAVTFByWNTMOlMPbQjtSMoZIbQ |
| V2 Complete Rework | https://patatenouille.itch.io/alchemysterious |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/ld49-unstable |
Ratings
| Overall | 666th | 3.579⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 918th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 664th | 3.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 995th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 380th | 3.647⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 591th | 3.55⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
You should give this one a chance. You've got a nice base for a game and its playable (clipping through walls is just a box collider away of solving it!)
You should rate games of other people to be rated after getting at least the first step working like, say, getting the axe.Once you get the axe you can just state that the game ends there because it needs more work. The lab is nicely done and you can fidget with things and the notes which give you an insight in how the game is supposed to be. I'd also upload this to itch.io rather than mega since it allows you to put updates. I hope you don't give up!
Cheers! :D
For the axe, you actually don't have to pick it up anywhere, it shows up when you interact with a mineral deposit (the things that looks like piles of rocks and say "Hold to mine" when looking at them). This is a rather good example of how unclear the game is xD
The walls actually have a collider, but we used Rigibody.MovePosition, which despite sort of having collisions seems to have issues with small colliders (probably not doing sweep test, even though it's set to continuous detection), using the velocity instead works perfectly.
You're right about itch.io ! We choose mega because it was faster to upload there, and we finished uploading ~30 seconds before the end of the submission hour... But we could and definitely should do it now that there's time.
As for rating other people's game, we're waiting for a proper version of our game (which we want to get out by the end of the week) before rating, so that as few people as possible try the game in this messy version.
We did not had much time during the week-end so it was a bit delayed, but we reached a quality we're proud of. We're finishing the last details, doing some more playtesting to ensure we don't forget crucial elements this time.
If we go on a rating spree we should be able to get some ratings before the end of the jam !
In the meantime we'll get some well deserved sleep and go rate as many games as we can before the end of the jam.
@lychee yeah for the three days we had it was a bit overscoped, tho we did waste the entire first day looking for assets, coded all the necessary things during the next two, but only started actually making the game level in the last 4-5 hours... It was quite frustrating to have made everything, but simply did not had the time to use it and properly design the level.
Also I am curious how far each of you made it into the game ? Were the hints sufficient to understand what to do ? or did you get stuck at some point ?
The environment is nice and the lighting with the moody music create an interesting atmosphere of mystery and woe. I liked the mechanics of finding clues in the environment. I wish there also were some clues to which rock is which - maybe some alchemical geology book with pictures or something to that effect :)
We actually did a lot of playtesting while making the game, the game started working at half the jam, but we sticked to dev test scenes without making an actual level, which we only started making at the end of the jam...