So the ratings are out and I don't exactly agree on the results. My top overall ratings, for those interested:

Solo

Chrysopoeia (9.00)
The Hermetic Order Of Alchemists (8.00)
Mixium (8.00)
Sil the Alchemist (8.00)
The Six Keys to the Philosopher's Stone (8.00)

Three puzzles in the top 5, what has befallen me?

Team

The Wanderer (7.00)
Modern Alchemy (7.00)
Transformist (7.00)

Considerably lower averate score for team entries this time. There were only 15 of them, which might explain it.

Other?

But this is not about the top titles, you see I always play and comment on as many entries as I can in a jam (this time all of the 58!) For me the best projects are those that don't simply make me think critically, but also make me realize something or remind me of an interesting design.

This time there was one of those, the last title I played, an unranked, fake themed entry:

Redshirt's Escape

So what did I realize? Even exploring an empty, abandoned complex can be exciting with a ticking clock of impending doom in the background. Also reminded me of an older design I haven't gotten to prototyping yet, concerning a rogue AI in a spacestation, so that's good.

Great jam, worth repeating.

This is a cross-post from my blog, where you'll find many more in-depth gamedev-related articles.

Mixium is a puzzle game in which you mix liquids to achieve a particular ratio. The trouble is: your beakers don't have any scale on them, so you can only fill them to the brim or empty them into a larger beaker.

Mixium was my entry for the 1st Alakajam! game jam competition. I entered in the Solo division, which means everything has to be made by a single person from scratch within 48
hours. It ranked 5th place overall, 3rd place in the Theme category, and 1st in Gameplay! Even though Alakajam! is still a relatively small event (there were 36 contestants in the Solo division), this is a new record for me, and one that will be hard to beat as the community grows.

Here's a little postmortem of how things went.

What went wrong

• I didn't have a free schedule this weekend. The competition ran from 21:00 on Friday until 21:00 on Sunday, but all of Friday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday evening were taken up by social activities. This, plus the need to catch up on some sleep, left me with about half a weekend to make this game. If I'd had more time, I would have added a nicer background (a drawing of an alchemy lab, animated if possible). I would also have added some sound effects: just pouring and a poof sound when you make something would already have made a big difference in game feel.

• The original idea was about mixing metals into alloys, and I had chosen the punny name Alloy Vera for that reason. But as I ended up with all sorts of random liquids, whose names mostly end in -ium, I changed the name to the more appropriate Mixium instead. I still like the original name better, because it's catchier and it implies a person whom I could have given some character through her journal entries. On the other hand, you'd have ended up with much more boring substances if all you had to mix were metals.

• Because I was afraid of being bitten by floating-point accuracy problems, I started by implementing a fractions library (there doesn't seem to be one in Haxe). This in itself was easy enough, but because I was expecting to need a lot of operations on these, I wanted to give my Fraction class overloaded operators. Turns out, operator overloading in Haxe is stupidly limited: it can only be done on abstracts, and like most of Haxe, only documented in the form of some examples. I couldn't get it to work, and eventually just went with regular add, subtract, multiply and divide methods. I should not have wasted so much time on this; I guess I've been out of game jams for too long and was having trouble shaking off my “clean code” mentality.

• Then it turned out that pouring fluid back and forth a lot would result in overflow in my Fraction class. Instead of also coding up (or downloading) a BigInteger class, I decided to just use regular Floats instead, and compare them with some tolerance. Yes, this means you can solve some levels by just pouring back and forth until the mixture is close enough to the target ratio! But I deemed this realistic, and a nice “think outside the box” loophole.

• Another technical problem I encountered is that the html5 export of the game did not render the fluids correctly. Actually, it didn't render them at all. HaxeFlixel is supposed to be fully cross-platform, but (like Haxe itself), it doesn't deliver on this promise. I don't remember the exact problem, but I did spend over an hour trying various combinations of rendering sprites to other sprites in order to make it work in the browser. I really should learn to work with the underlying OpenFL library directly, which has fewer such bugs, and they're getting fixed more quickly. HaxeFlixel lets you pick between “legacy”, which gives you an old and buggy OpenFL 3, and “next”, which gives you the new and great OpenFL 4, but with lots of bugs in the HaxeFlixel wrappers instead.

• A bug: when pouring an empty beaker that once contained something into a nonempty one, the fluid disappears in both; and when pouring out such an empty “dirty” beaker into another empty one, it crashes entirely. This turns out to be due to a division by zero bug, which I'm normally really wary of, so I don't know how this slipped through the cracks.

What went right

• Despite the shortage of time, it's still a finished game, with a beginning, an end, several puzzles with a gradually increasing level of difficulty, consistent graphics, and some background music.

• This is the second game that I've ever made music for. It's not exactly Mozart, but it somehow still made 13th place in the Audio category, which must mean that people didn't hate it too much. Bosca Ceoil was new for me, but it's super easy to work with.

• The difficulty curve seems to be alright, judging from the feedback. This was largely luck. I made most of the levels by copying the previous level and changing it to add a twist, but it was tricky to make sure that the changes didn't make it trivially solvable. For example, if you have two spare beakers that differ in volume by only 1, you can make pretty much anything with them. I also found that the more beakers I added to a puzzle, the more options the player has and the easier the puzzle gets.

• I finished the splash screen literally in the last minute before the deadline. It doubles as a tiny tutorial, because you have to click the beaker to continue, teaching the player that beakers can be clicked. It would have been better to make them light up when hovered, but there was no time for that. (I initially had them move upwards when hovered, but that got too distracting, and there was no longer a distinction between the ‘hovered’ and the ‘selected’ state.)

Thanks to everyone who played, commented and voted! Here's the results page with comments, and here's the playable game. Enjoy!

Thanks to everyone who took part in rating and commenting on games, and congratulations to the winners! You can discover the results here:

Solo rankings | Team rankings

We hope you had fun joining this competition, hopefully the first of a long series! Since this is the first time we're running it, we'd love to get your feedback through this 2 minute survey.

Next events

Here's the calendar for the next competitions. While the next Alakajam! will be hosted in February, we'll run smaller events in the mean time, focused more on learning, sharing tips and experimenting. See you then!

1st Kajam > 13 October - 19 November 2017 (what is this?)

2nd Alakajam! > 23-25 February 2018

Behind the scenes…

Despite the appearances, this first Alakajam! was not just the work of wan (ewww, look who's speaking of himself at the 3rd person):

• Hosts: @wan @eremiell @toasty
• Code contributors: @thomastc @toasty @rnlf @aurel300 @pta2002 @dollarone @thrainsa @NiciusB
• IRC Operators: @eremiell @tsjost @toasty @sorceress
• Testing & feedback: @sorceress @adam and various nice people who reported bugs :)

Also, shout out to the various streamers (in particular DanaePlays & Aurel for their hype marathon), who made the event much more lively :)

-Quick Post-

I'd like to thank everyone who played my game and gave me feedback.
I really super duper ultra mega appreciate it! I will try to improve
on the game based on your suggestions (once I get my computer fixed).

So… yeah that's about all I wanted to say. ;-)
~Toffie

Should have written this a few days ago, but I simply forgot.

The idea

I read the theme, then the real theme and immediately looked up the history of alchemy on wikipedia, interesting stuff. Then moved on to other resources (mostly on Scribd), more interesting stuff! Somewhere here the idea of an interactive text based story started to take form and then it clicked. Better run with it.

The prose

Wrote 15 pages worth of design and prose before implementing anything. It all came out with relative ease. No stress, no fuss, just writing for 10 hours worth.

The code

Here's why I was feeling so sure about the implementation. I'd been working on another text based project recently and that system, I reckoned, would fit well here too. It did! Had minor issues, but it was mostly smooth sailing (and hard work, of course). The fact that parts of the system were data driven and other parts code did annoy me quite a bit.

Release

Finished the alchemy actions last, at the beginning of the final hour! Managed to draw one quick cover image while setting up the jam and itch.io pages. It came close and there is a RL reason for it. Had to spend 6 hours away from the jam on Sunday morning.

Total effective working hours: 43

Post-Jam

After the jam I realized that the code part was a blessing in diguise. It is always easier to hack things together in code than in a custom data files. It took me many days (only a few hours per day, though) to port all the code logic to a completely data driven system for the post-jam project.

The project is nowhere finished, unfortunately. There are many story elements that I want to add to it and I haven't had the time to do a lot of writing yet. Now that the rating period is over I can concentrate on that some more.

Conclusion

The first interactive short story I've ever made; learned a few writing techniques. Also improved the data driven system for future projects so that's good.

A great jam as usual. I do enjoy these events a lot; the testing and commenting part is a big draw for me. I managed to try every single entry this time, taken that there were only 58 of them. I dread the jam where there are more entries than I can play in two weeks.

Will write some entry recommendations and ideas on the rating system in the up coming days.

Cheers!

Our friends DanaePlays and @Aurel300 will host a marathon stream this Sunday: they will try and play all the games from the jam (at least those they didn't try yet)… until the jam results are revealed.

If your game wasn't played yet, make sure to tune in and request it to have it played live! And of course, let's all meet at the stream at 7pm UTC to discover the results together ;)

	What	When	Where
	marathon results hype	12:00 - 19:00 UTC	https://go.twitch.tv/danaeplays

Dear Alchemists,

You have until this Sunday, 7pm UTC to rate and review other games. When the time runs out, the final rankings will immediately be revealed!

If you submitted a Solo/Team entry, make sure you have at least 10 votes, or you will not be featured in the final rankings. To make sure you can reach that goal, you should aim for rating at least 10/15 games.

Rescue mode is on

For the final days, the event's games page features a selection of games nearing 10 votes, go rescue them!

last time i have changed research system, now i trying to change crucible crafting

what's new?

added water and temperature bars. Each recipe
now consumes water and can be done only at exact temeratures
for example zirconium(Zr) now consumes 10L of water and optimal temp for it is 40-60°

Hey Everyone,

First thing I have to say before anything, holy hell, I need to step up my Jam naming game. I never seem to find good names for my games.

Now that this is out of the way, let's start this post-mortem.

Solo Jamming

Since I wasn't sure if I would have my entire weekend to do the jam, I decided to avoid leaving others in a pickle if I left. In the end, that was a good move as I had a lot of movement during the weekend.

While my past experience with solo jamming had been poor (couldn't keep going the second day), I was scared I would come out of the jam with an incomplete pile of code that could not be played. But I pulled through. Morning of Day 2 was hard to get into but I found the force to start and everything went without a stop until late into the night.

Game Theme and Mechanics

The aim of my game was to hit on that "mad alchemist, trying to create ressources from scratch" vibe and I think it's easy to see how. Although, as some comments on the game pointed out…

[…] I do feel it turned into a bit of a "try mixing all different combos one by one until I discover something". […]

Lack of time did make me go very simplistic on the recipe system. And that is one of the things I am planning on fixing. In further Jams, I will need to shrink my concept even more when working alone. In retrospect, cutting the "Onion Farming" part and replacing it with a slowly increasing gold would have given me enough time to flesh out the research system or work further on the story of the game as the second part of the comment above mentionned.

[…] Didn't feel like there was a direction for me to go in, or any risk, or real incentive to play.

As another comment pointed out, I did skimp very much on the story in my rush to get a lot of systems in.

[…] Having no tips and just trying to mix counted component is a little harsh.

In the future jams, my focuses will probably be player attraction (through story or tutorial) as well as cutting down on mechanics to make them better.

On Interface Design

[…] Only thing I felt missing is the graphics that you could have added! No Sounds still works! But missing graphics give a emptiness feel. […]

Being alone and not being that good of an artist, I left the game very basic looking. Looking at the game in my editor and fiddling with stuff, I think I understood why it was so weird to some. Removing the cauldron, which I made hastily, looks a lot more natural, especially for any veteran of A Dark Room or similar game.

[…] Perhaps the UI could be improved - I was already getting frustrated at scrolling up and down the list. Maybe I'm not just cut out for alchemy? […]

Another comment I got a lot regarded the Interface and how tedious it became after a while. I have been compiling the comments and will have to do a lot of Quality of Life upgrade before I even accept to present the game HtG will become for another full test. Good thing at least is that the UI upgrades are my main concern at the moment.

From scrolling through an ever-growing list of ressources, to clicking through each and every component of a complex recipe (Pyritic Acid being made of 49 basic elements as one of the commenters pointed out), I have a lot to fix.

Difficulty And Length

…or, in an alternate interpretation, I just spent several hours of my weekend, filling out the blanks in an Excel-sheet listing fictional materials, with 90% of that time being spent on repeating actions I'd already performed multiple times before :-) […]

One of the things I have always been having trouble with (be it video game making, D&D campaigns, etc.) is correctly aligning both pendulum to be centered at the same time. And it seems this time I have let both go far out of sync. As the comment shows, the game can take multiple hours (of repeated actions at this point) to complete, which is far over what you should have in a game jam. I will let another part of the same comment speak as far as difficulty.

[…] Out of these 231 combinations, only 23 are meaningful, i.e. moves the research forward by either discovering a new element, or by winning the game. Also, when an attempt is made, the materials are usually lost. And finally, losing an advanced element means that you have to spend time on rebuilding that element from more basic elements (using processes you have already discovered and followed previously), just to get back to the point where you can continue your research from the point where you left off.

As the game progress and becomes more and more complex, I will be very careful of monitoring both pendulums more accurately. (and a little bird tells me I will most likely need to add some tools in-game for me to analyze some sample playthroughs to understand where the game hitches)

What's Next?

As the game stands right now, I will have two things ahead of me: Improving and Progressing. As such, I will do some progression early but most of the early work will clearly be improvements. Most of those come from the comments I received.

Currently on my shortlist of things to fix:

• Modify the UI to reduce the amount of scrolling through the list.
• Allow for creation of intermediate products easily (to reduce the total amount of clicks to create the ingredients you are currently working on)
• Make recipe results clearer
• Correct the money generation aspect
• Increase the amount of successful recipes (within the currently existing ressources)
• Reduce the price of failure
• Increase recipe hint counts
• Improve the Shop

On the medium to long term list:

• Improve the Story component
• Improve the Recipe System
• Improve the Recipe Book
• Add an In-Game way of tracking your progress
• Work on new features…

after some thinking and experimenting, looks like i found the way to make good, balanced research system for my game.

How will it work

• i will call elements from periodic table "metals" and elements from research game "elements", otherwise whole post will be annoying and hard to understand

Firstly, to do some reaserach you require special metal for each try (it goes on top of couldron)
Then you can add another metal as catalyst (it goes on left side, before step counter), it wil unlock random step even if you don't match anything
Then goes grow-like matching game. You can't use the same element more than 1 time now. Also if you unlock step, you have to follow it, or next researches will not work
After selecting all elements click "research"
When you finish the research it will unlock new recipe for cauldron or some other stuff

short vid about new system
*thanks to @benjamin and @wan for ideas that helped me to make new system. *