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Nice submission!

I found it a little hard to figure out some of the potionmaking, but there was a cute pig so it was ok.

Cool system and well done to implement so much mechanics within the jam time!

Thank you for the comment @mascoll! Isn't the pig lovely? Our artist will surely be happy to hear about it.

It is indeed hard to find the correct combinations! The idea is not to be afraid of mixing things, as even after death, you will still be able to see all your previous receipts (as long as you drank the potion!). As a little clue, it might be worth starting with only combining two things, and then moving up to more "exotic" combinations. The map does change after each death, but it shouldn't be a problem, there's plenty of items! (Make sure to reach for the water near the river!)

As you said, there is lots of things in there, and we were a bit short of time. Ideally, we would have wanted to have "random" combinations also yield positive outcomes (ie. not always poison that takes time). Sadly... There was no time for it. Neither for the poor fish that lived in the river (although the butterflies did make it in time!).

Once again, thank you for your honest review!

A very cool idea, but so far it seems very tedious in practice. Is there something I'm missing or do I just have to keep mixing random ingredients hoping for a hit?

Thank you @dkmk100!

There is some logic to most combinations (like water and fire not mixing, or almost always consisting of a base element, such as water/fire/air, and then some flower/stone/gem), but nothing too absolute or rigid. Sadly, we didn't have time to incorporate any hints as to what combines with what, so right now it indeed is hit-and-miss. The trick, though, is not being scared to try, accumulate knowledge in form of simple receipts, and then complicate them in further runs. Dying is not only fine, but encouraged!

Also, as I was said in a previous comment, we would have wanted to have “random” combinations also yield positive outcomes (ie. not always poison that takes time). Sadly… There was no time for it.

Thank you again!

So much content, great effort for putting it all in within such a small amount of time

Thank you @boc-dev! We really enjoyed creating all the elements, potions, and bringing everything to life! Really happy that you liked it :D

Hello! I was a bit lost because I don't read etc... Anyway the concept is really funny.

Nice piggy! I think for me there were kinda just too many things. The text was also fairly difficult to read so processing a lot of items was kinda difficult. If there were fewer items I think it'd be easier to get in to trying stuff, as right now there's just thousands of combinations and I have no idea where to start.

Hi @nardandas, thank you so much! We also love the piggy ^^
It is true that there quite some combinations possible, but most of them are logic combinations (check a previous comment for more details). We encourage you to keep trying and see how much you can extend the life of our Alchemist Myst :P

this was a curious game, i saw rougelike so I was definitely in from the get go for replayablity which this game has. the concept of knowledge next revealed after the inevitable makes sense

good for those who like puzzly crafting

Thanks so much @reulan!! Happy to see that you enjoyed brewing potions, hopefully you discovered many of the good ones!!

I love the idea... unfortunately after making probably 50+ different kinds of potions and desperately trying to come up with some logic around what was good and what wasn't, I still only managed to damage and kill myself. Had to give up eventually.

I like the spin on the roguelike genre! The menus are cute, and potion-mixing games are games I can't get enough of. Myst's garden is really plentiful, lol. If you ever make a full version, it could be cool to hide some more of the ingredients so you have to go to certain spots or mine after them to get them. I think it took me like 10 potions to find a good one, and after that my life goal became collecting crystals. :smile: There doesn't seem to be a way of tracking how long you survived for, which is something I missed, but apart from that, an entertaining entry!

I like the mixing and the trial & error process for finding new recipes. It was stressful at first trying to find something to delay dying (I was hoping the pig would give me some tips or something), but once I did, the challenge was just lost because the ingredients are so abundant you could basically just live forever on any potion. The concept is good though and the inventory and crafting systems work well. Nice job!

I can't say this isn't unique and innovative. Great concept and I think it could be made into a pretty fun mobile game.

With my rating you got the 20 required! Congrats.

Good music and I also loved the mixing mechanics. The dialog at the beginning and the fact that it is a pig who speaks with you, makes me think that this is not the first time that this dude drank the "wrong potion" jeje.

Thanks for you entry it has been very fun to play :)

Interesting take on the theme! I wish there was some kind of hint system to steer me in the right direction though, I ended up with a giant stack of dubious potions and no real idea where to go from there.

The art is cute, though there's some upscaling issues where a sprite has been enlarged by a decimal value (i.e. 1.5, 1.33, etc) so only *some* of its pixels are doubled and that's a pet peeve of mine.

Dig the idea, but I feel like I was thrown in the deep end a little.

Hey all! I'll try my best to address all comments! Thank you all!

@eli-delventhal Yeah.. we get the feeling! The number of combinations can be overwhelming, specially if you try to combine more than two items at once. I'd recommend starting with easy combinations, some are even somewhat logical (see comments above!), and then once you got some juice to keep the game going, build you way up to the harder ones.

@anaxie-studio I'm so glad you loved it so much! Indeed, plentiful is not quite enough to describe the myriad of items in the world haha. Your suggestion is not only good, but in the right direction I'd say! We already have some items that only spawn at certain places, such as water on the river at the border of the map (remember where your table is at!), and stones over the stony paths. Next step would be, as you said, making some of them more scarce and tied to environment.
As for tracking process, try hitting ESC! It will bring up the menu with the number of seconds you have survived so far. Admittedly, it breaks a bit the flow if you must hit ESC, maybe bringing it next to the bar at the top would be a good idea, don't you think?

@sacredbacon I like the idea of the pig giving clues! That is something we will look into for sure. Sadly, we didn't have enough time for that. As for taking the difficulty away... be careful with consuming too much of a single potion! Myst builds resistance to it and each time it gives you less seconds! Although... Right now it always gives at least 1 second, so it can still be exploitable I guess? Mass-producing a single potion and then right-clicking faster than 1 second (totally doable)... Yup, must change that! Thank you!

@jesus-gonzalez Thank you so much for the lovely comment! We are so thrilled to have reached 20 ratings! I can't agree more with you, a mobile game would totally fit the theme (and dare I say... a Switch game? Although we are far from being able to do that).

@muriel Hahaha! Totally! Why else would a pig talk to you so calmly after being poisoned? Thank you so much for the kind comment!

@flaterectomy embrace death! Nah, in all seriousness, while dying is expected and encouraged (make sure to drink the potions to find if they are any good), the difficulty might be a bit too much. With a bit more time we might have placed a hints system, maybe finding complete receipts on the map, something. As it is, it is hit and miss, although that is okay if you don't mind dying; receipts persist for next runs.

As for pixel issues... I'm going to come clean here. All I have done with Unity is 3D, our artist occasionally paints as a hobby and has just started with procreate (and had never done pixel art), and our other dev had only done some dabbling in Unity. You can't even imagine how much we struggled with it... For a good three hours I thought I'd have to tell the artist to redraw everything! It's not perfect (certainly not pixel-perfect, sorry for the bad joke), but we are extremely proud of how it ended up. Next ludum dare, though, we'll come much more prepared! Btw, no hard feelings, it's honest feedback and the truth! We will improve! :D

I think this was a solid idea (potion making and experimenting) that just needed some refining. Like others have said, the sheer amount of combinations was daunting. I won't repeat all that though :)

The exploration mechanic was neat, but I'm not sure it actually added to the experience. Just to brainstorm, what if the game were the view of the alchemy table itself? All the different ingredients are already available (much easier to see "the combinations"), and you spend the game mixing and testing potions in front of you (no need to ever mix more than one at a time). That puts the focus on the core of the game (potion mixing) instead of resource hunting.

That may turn into an entirely different game, and not the one you envisioned. For example, if everything I needed was at the table, why wouldn't I just keep making the same thing over and over again? Where would the challenge be? So my idea isn't perfect either :) Just shows that a lot of games could be presented differently!

By the way, I was IMPRESSED by how many different ingredients and potion bottles you were able to come up with. That was cool!!

@netpunk yeah I was very logical about how I combined things, and did only two at a time. Did stuff like water plus just one other thing, thinking water would be good base. Still didn't end up working out for me. Still really love the idea.

"Experiment, drink, and learn." Sums up a period in our lives for many of us I think :wink:
A lot to like here, starting with the in-game tutorial/instructions which are especially good in a jam rating scenario.
BTW I think I was occasionally able to add more than 6 items to the 'Bases and agents' by adding from the 'Recipes' section?
Plenty of humour and a very pleasing feel with the broad palette/pixel art/touches like butterflies which leads to an uplifting interpretation of the theme. Nice entry.

The idea was good and game was easy to understand. My only problem was the readability of stuff. Maybe it's because I played on the web version, but some of the text weren't really readable and the icons were so small. Just scaling them up, or designing the graphics with that already in mind would help a lot.

Anyways, great game, great simple mechanic. Thank you for submitting!

Wow, that is a lot of ingredients to mix. Nice art style. Good job with the game.

I'm REALLY impressed with the volume of content that is here. Nice job putting so much together in such a short time! I managed to get lucky and find a potion that healed quite a lot very early on :) Nice entry!