Capitalist Alchemist by Jonas Michael
Do you like making money?
Good.
Do you like to live?
If you answered yes, also good.
Welcome to your shed, where you have to work your way up from being a poor Alchemist that only knows how to produce steel to a rich Alchemist who can breathe fire and live forever!
Find the right recipes, save them in your book and make money by choosing the best recipe. However, you can only consider the game won, once you have successfully brewed the Potion Of Eternal Life, for which the recipe is saved from the start. The difficult bit is getting there.
Still, this is no easy game. You will need to experiment a lot, and quite a few combinations will not work out the way you might have planned. That is the unstable element of Alchemy.
The controls are simple: you only need your mouse. Everything else will be explained in the all-knowing book!
Don't forget to leave a comment, especially if you have done the speedrun-mode (also include a screenshot as proof of validity :smirk:).
Thank you for playing this game!
Also, just to clear things up, because the first instruction isn't very clear: you can make steel by putting (at least) one iron and one coal into the input slots of the furnace (the ones on the left, when you click on the furnace) and some coal in the area below (you need to click on it, so that the slots become active). Then you have to click the button with the arrow pointing to the right. Clicking the "arrow"-button generally consumes one item from each input and begins the recipe handling.
Team:
BauerFB - Graphics, Creative Input
Jonas Michael - Code, Art Supervision, Music
Update 1.1: fixed a bug where the position of the inventory bar was calculated wrong. SHOULD be fixed now...
Credit:
Font: Google Ephesis
| Link | https://ukuleleontrumpet.itch.io/capitalist-alchemist |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/capitalist-alchemist |
Ratings
| Overall | 1395th | 2.917⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1382th | 2.711⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 881th | 3.184⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1349th | 2.711⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1226th | 2.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 650th | 3.289⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 963th | 2.588⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
Since I did most of this project by myself (except for the graphics, for which I am eternally grateful!), I experienced a significant lack of preplanning and in return found myself at a lack of time for a lot of polishing I had planned. However, regarding the actual game, I am very happy with the result. I feared my plans would be too ambitious, but I managed to finish the game in time. My only personal issue is with the balancing.
I might revisit that part tomorrow and upload a post-LD version for you to experience, what the actual feel of the game was supposed to be.
I would advise not using fancy fonts when there is a lot of stuff to read.
EDIT : if open and close the inventory menu it goes back in a weird place where I can't access the shop button, or any of inventory at all.
Edit: I just noticed the problem. You were not using fullscreen, probably, right? I will upload a version with this bug fixed - since it is game breaking, this should be allowed.
In any case, thank you for your feedback. Thank you for appreciating the ambitions I had for the game in regards to the content. I know, that I have overdone it and left no space for polishing in my schedule. Since this was my first time doing all of the programming, I think this problem was to be expected, but I didn't respect it enough.
I will take your more detailed feedback into consideration the next time I have to make a game; I have always done step-by-step tutorials, so I thought I might try something new, but it didn't seem to stick. Also, the choice of font did match the style I was going for, but considering the font size I can see why there were problems with readability.
There's a lot to explore and the effort behind the game can be felt.
I would have wished for a slightly better UI without zooming in on the different spaces and some kind of highlighting on the interactive parts for example by placing them bright on the front while the background is a bit more darker).
However it is fun to try out the recipes and the overall gameplay is nice.
Thank you for making this game!
Unfortunately I keep getting an error "Out of memory. If you are the developer of this content, try allocating more memory to your WebGL build in the WebGL player settings." I've tried three times now but can't get much further than making the red potion because of it, and I have to start again every time it happens. Please could you tag me if you're able to fix this or if you add a load/save feature, as I would love to be able to finish the game.
> this game has seen very little balancing. I expect most items to be too cheap, but I never managed to actually check on them.
I found indeed that in the game, but you were brave to do a game like this, so kudos. In game jams it's always risky to choose genres that require a lot of balancing.