Alchimia by Deseteral
You've just graduated from The Magic School.
Congratulations!
After 10 long years of studying and dreaming about your favorite place on the Continent you can finally fulfill your dreams.
You take a small load and open your own potion shop. Will you be able to run your store and pay off the debt?
Important: Chrome is recommended to play. Sound is not working on Safari.




| Link | https://deseteral.itch.io/alchimia |
| Link | https://github.com/Deseteral/alchimia |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/alchimia |
Ratings
| Overall | 294th | 3.306⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 325th | 3.083⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 178th | 3.472⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 467th | 2.556⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 81th | 3.972⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 234th | 3.167⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 198th | 2.778⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 84th | 3.722⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 16🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
The monochrome graphics are good, they give the game a certain mood/style while also saving development time!
Too bad that the 10 second mechanic is only used to spawn new clients, it would've been nice to have some pressure on the potion brewing!
(and the names of the potions were super fun)
For a moment I was worried that the orders will keep coming every ten seconds. I was relieved that there is an end of the day and that the customers were patient enough to wait. Graphics are nice and no complaints regarding the sound. There are quite a few mini games, which is a pretty nice achievement for the short jam time.
# Mini games
- Knife and spell mini games felt too long.
- Boiling mini game was usually fine, but if the target jump was about half range you ended up loosing progress.
- Grinding minigame was good, tho a bit strange that it was the only place I needed to use my mouse.
# Recepies
- some of the recipes are very long and require the a bunch of the longer mini games, which felt like a big investment compared to the rather small return
- my smooth brain was struggling to remember the more involved ones and I had to abort and double check multiple times, since I didn't want to screw up and loos my hard earned components
- Finding the right ingredients from the list was hard since I sometimes had leftovers from previous potions. I ended up clearing the entire stock with a botched "jungle juice potion" and only making exactly what I needed for the recipe
# ~~Bug~~ Features
For some reason I sometimes get multiple products for one operation, which would have been nice if not for the point I made earlier. I looked at the debugging logs that you do and noticed that they seem to be on purpose. I would love to know what is going on there?
I also think that the minigames are too difficult and some are too long. The game also lacks general UX polish.
This is unfortunately due to lack of time and small amount of playtesting.
@voidsay as for the multiple products from a single minigame - this was done on purpose. The idea was that you as the player would get simpler recipes first and more complicated later. By that time you would build a collection of prepared products and focus more on mixing them and consulting the recipe book. But this was also done clumsy because of the lack of time.
However, while this game is very charming, it really needs a UX makeover. At the beginning, I was just pressing all the different arrow keys and was always surprised at what the screen did. I had read to press down to open the recipe book in the tutorial, but I had no idea there was even a cauldron until coming back and looking at the screenshots. The relationship between the shop screen, mini-game screen, cauldron screen, and recipe book screen was just not clear. Even something as small as adding arrows at the sides or maybe transitions would have helped immensely.
Regardless, once I figured out how the UI worked, I really enjoyed the game.
I don't really see how the 10 second theme affects my life in this game. I just prepare ingredients and prepare potions as fast as I can, especially since you have time to serve everybody after the day ends. The mechanic gives no pressure or essence to the game. It's just there, although it is cool to have a little bit of time to prepare random ingredients at the beginning of the day.
I like the idea of slowly rembering recipes better and having more and more of the game in your working memory. The game currently doesn't incentivize this, especially because customers wait for you. I think coins from orders scale downwards the longer someone has to wait, but it was hard to tell. That said the minimum is clearly 1, and I have infinite time at the end of the day so what stops me from preparing all the ingredients I'll ever need at the end of a day.
I really like the style and graphics of this game. I also have a special fondness for alchemy themes. The minigames are neat but they get boring quick.