There are loads of games getting demos right now ahead of Steam Next Fest, and if you were to go after the flashiest, most polished-looking games, you might miss some of the treasure that’s out there, hiding in plain sight.
One such piece of treasure is Alchemist’s Alcove, a new turn-based roguelike with a cute, stripped-back pixel art style with a focus on item crafting and exploring an open-world full of magic and warring factions.
Today is the eve of Next Fest, and in the run up to this year’s event, I had the chance to interview Adam, the solo dev behind Nefarious Brew Games. I’ll let him explain his game, because there’s a degree of complexity here that is best left to its creator-in-chief.
RL: What is Alchemist’s Alcove all about, then?
In Alchemist’s Alcove, you play as a nameless traveller, trapped in a vast pocket dimension known as the Alcove. Your mind is almost empty, only one memory willing to remind you why you ever came here. But you aren’t alone, as the denizens of the Alcove and other travellers fill the lands, a centuries-long war still shedding blood. The only way out is to discover ancient secrets and master the art of alchemy in order to craft the Philosopher’s Stone.
NBG: I’ve been having a huge amount of fun crafting the lore for this game! It all started kind of nebulous, but it’s been getting more and more solid and congruent as time goes on. There are powerful beings and dead gods, ancient plagues and betrayed cultists, and a whole lot more. The pocket dimension itself has mechanics that the player can learn about and are important to the lore. So far playtesters have been enjoying the lore, but I’m really excited to see how everyone reacts to all the secrets!
How do you make an open-world feel alive and engaging while balancing the complexity of proc-gen?
I think the best way to make a world feel “alive” is to give an indication that there’s a history here that the player isn’t aware of, that this world has already been “lived in” long before the player ever arrived. This is really something I’d stumbled on, and I’m really glad I did. I always planned on having a narrative and lore, but when I first released the public playtest everyone was talking about the bits of lore I’d sprinkled in completely by accident. The factions in the game are warring and players felt like there was a history there, a history I’d actually not thought too deeply about at the time. There’s a note somewhere in the game that was originally meant to be a throwaway line but has now completely defined my plans for the overall lore since players were so intrigued by what it implied. It was all a kind of happy little accident that’s completely altered the course of the game into something far better than it would have been before, with lore being much more involved in the gameplay than I’d originally planned.
But that only makes it feel “alive” and gives player lore and narrative elements to care about. “Engaging” is another story — there are some more tricks I use to make sure the gameplay doesn’t get too stale. For example, like I mentioned earlier, there are warring factions which means that enemies won’t just be attacking you, but each other as well. This can create some interesting puzzles where the position of each enemy really matters, and moving tactically can be the difference between an enemy attacking you and attacking someone else.
The world itself is consistent, with only enemy positions in each room being randomized. This sounds like it’d make the game pretty boring, but it actually makes the game much easier to balance and ensures I can easily control the difficulty of any given area. It also helps the players get used to the game and not have to worry about needing to learn too many things at once… I’m already asking a lot from the player to learn the alchemy system, I don’t want to shove too many things at them at once. It’s a bit of a tradeoff, but one that leans in the game’s favor, I think.
It’s a very technical game with lots of inventory management and build tinkering – what kind of crafting systems are you using?
The crafting system is deceptively simple, though there is definitely a lot of inventory management and memorization which I’m still trying to make easier for the player. Basically, you can take two items in the game, and if a recipe exists for them, you get new items out of it. For example, if you combine ash and sulfur, you get spark powder, which you can combine with your flint to make a flame.
Just inputs and outputs, so at its core very simple, though there’s some pretty fun stuff you can do with some of the recipes. For example, diminution powder, which is inspired by Noita’s diminution liquid, is able to break down items into their base components.
However some items don’t really involve their crafting components anymore, for example if a flame creates smoke it wouldn’t make sense for you to be able to diminute the smoke back into flame… instead, you’d get a diamond and fresh air, which are the chemical components of the smoke. This creates some “meta recipe paths” that allow players to get access to items in new ways by being creative. If you get really creative, there are actually quite a few infinite loops that can give you infinite resources, though those require specific items and a lot of tinkering to discover.
It’s a very simple system, but you can really do a lot with a simple system, especially because your knowledge crosses over between runs so once you discover something game-breaking you can use it whenever you want.
Not everyone wants to talk about other games, but if you do, what kind of inspirations have informed your gameplay pillars?
I’m actually super glad you asked this because I love talking about games! The question I asked myself when I first started developing Alchemist’s Alcove was “What if Caves of Qud and Rift Wizard had a baby?”
Since then, Outer Wilds has become the game’s cool uncle and Noita its wild aunt. It’s really a sort of melting pot of all these games, with some of my own thoughts and opinions sprinkled on top.
The core, most important pillar of the game is the exploration and discovery. A large part of that is exploring the alchemy system and discovering new recipes, but I also want the player to explore the world and discover new secrets.
I’m drawing a lot from Outer Wilds and CoQ in terms of the exploration, where the game will tell you about something, a place or event, and you can actually go and find that place or the aftermath of the event you were told about. In Alchemist’s Alcove, I’m using this to teach the player hidden recipes, but there’s also some physical locations I want the player to find and explore.
Outer Wilds, especially the DLC, also has a lot of these moments where you’re like, “I could do that the whole time!? Of course I could, why couldn’t I?” and that’s something I really want to channel for Alchemist’s Alcove as well.
But one sort of, not flaw but detail about Outer Wilds is that the exploration is the only real gameplay pillar there. It’s not a bad thing, the focus on exploration is what makes the game so great, but I want the player to have some tangible rewards for exploring and discovering in Alchemist’s Alcove, and that comes in the form of combat.
I’m drawing a lot from Rift Wizard for the combat, with resistances and a focus on the shapes of the spells. Though, in Rift Wizard a lot of spells are more tactical and complicated, allowing players to set up some absolutely nasty chain reactions, but in Alchemist’s Alcove I’m going for a more simple approach when it comes to spells. The resistances already allow for some puzzle-solving, and finding a recipe for a new spell that counters a tough enemy’s resistance can be quite rewarding. Whereas if a player spent a lot of resources on a recipe that’s meant to be a “setup” spell rather than have powerful effects on its own, I think that’d be disappointing for the player, and it’s something I want to avoid.
I’m also drawing a lot from Rift Wizard in the art style which I think many people have caught onto, haha. A few sprites in the game actually came from a retexture I was doing for fun, more specifically the skeleton, slime, and bat were carried over straight from the retexture and the rest of the game’s sprites sort of carried on the art style. I really wanted the game to have a similar art style to Rift Wizard since I think the sprites in Rift Wizard are really good at what they need to do, you can look at the screen and immediately tell where everything is and what enemies going to do what. I also really admire the execution of the retro style, which is something I wanted to honor. I’m realizing now though this answer’s getting really long, so I’ll stop here! Sorry for the mini-rant, like I said I like talking about games!
What’s in the demo, and what can we expect moving forward?
The demo is a small slice of the larger game. Quite literally, it is a 16×16 slice of the 32×48 map of the actual game. The demo ends when you use the fragment of the Philosopher’s Stone, but in the full game you’ll need to carry it much further up to an altar.
Beyond the demo content, the game gets harder. Much harder. The “boss enemies” in the final encounter of the demo are slightly weaker than a lot of the enemies you’re going to encounter in the zone immediately following them. Enemies also get a lot more interesting, I’m giving them tools that allow them to interact with the game space in ways I haven’t allowed the Zone 1 enemies to. As an example, there’s a massive rhinoceros beetle that can rush into you from several tiles away, forcing a confrontation and dealing some decent damage. Running away won’t work, since it will rush you down again, and it’s quite beefy so killing it in one turn is difficult. The game gets much, much harder, and will require much more preparation.
The game’s still going to need balancing, I do want to avoid a Silksong situation where everyone’s complaining about how the game is tediously hard on release. I want to ensure the game is challenging rather than difficult. But there is a fine line to walk, because even some slight tweaks make these same enemies laughably easy even for new players. For example, I originally gave those beetles a warning shot that dealt no damage, so players had a sort of “freebie” before they’d start losing chunks of their health, but that made the enemies too easy to kite and kill, since the beetles weren’t as threatening a presence as they needed to be. Overall, the game is going to be changing a lot as playtesting continues.
As for how far the project can be developed, honestly I think it can be taken a lot further than I alone can take it. There’s a whole chunk of the map I’ve kind of been ignoring and will probably continue to (mostly) ignore until after release as there isn’t much I can do with it at the moment that’s related to the main lore/story (though there’s some side stuff I want to expand on post-release, potentially even alternate endings). But, I’ve been focusing a lot on mod support and I want to give players the tools to make anything they want… I’m hoping the modding scene can really flourish and take the game and its world as far as it can go.
