Game Design

In the deepest of the forest, an abandoned castle stood there, for thousands of years.

Rumor says, there’s an underground city, laying beneath the castle, countless treasures waiting to be found.

Many adventurers came to this mysterious castle, searching for treasures and secrets.

But unlike others, you’re no fighter, you’re just a guy who know something about herbs and potions, an AlCHEMIST, people call you.

So manage your garden, craft your potion, sell it in your shop. Remember, your potions will always impact those who fighting in the dungeon.

In this role-playing simulation game, player is not one of the warriors, instead, you play as an unconventional role, a shop owner in the castle who make potions for adventures.

The game demo have 4 main scenes right now.

The castle is the main area where player character can move around and interact with others.

They can purchase or sell stuff here, for example:

Player can buy herbs from other shop, once they purchase it, it’ll going to player’s inventory.

If player bought a shop stall, they could install it for selling their products later, like this:

Once shop stall is installed, player can open the dungeon map, check out the activity that’s going on down in the dungeon.

But for now, we need to add something to our shelf, for our customer to purchase.

As an alchemist, your primary goal is to craft potions out of herbs for the adventurers. You can go to the castle’s second floor for crafting, right now I haven’t finish drawing the second floor, so you can just click the upper stairs to have craft option.

This is the crafting menu, the window on the left is all the herbs you just bought. The red dot in the middle is basically a sight. The grids on the right is potion crafting map, let me explain.

When you click a herb, it comes to a pre-adding stage, the map will show a pattern display as blue grids, the black dot will constantly changing potion among the blue dots. This pattern is unique with different herbs.

After you clicked “Confirm adding” , red dot will be able to move to the black dot position.

And when the black dot move to a potion icon, and you hit confirm adding right now, it will be able to move on to the potion.

After moved on to a potion icon, you could get corresponding potion as a reward.

Now after you have potions, you can go back to your shelf and put them there, to begin to sell them.

Once some NPC bought a potion, and going down to the dungeon, you can now view their stats in you map.

This is the map of the dungeon, red dot representing the team of adventurers that bought your potions.

The map will have fog of war, only explored area will show up.

Once adventurers’ team encountered a battle, you can view the battle that’s going on.

This is a simple graph version of a auto battler. Red square means enemies, white means adventurers. Above them, is potions that you just crafted and bought buy them.

You can view their stats and hit “nextround” to proceed the battle. It’s a turn based auto battler, but you’ll find your potion play a significant role, without it, adventurers won’t be able to last for very long.

After adventurers succeed in a battle, they will come back with more golds, so they could potentially buy more potions from you.

You can play the demo to know how it works.

This is a system overview of Dungeon alchemist. Golden color represent how internal economy cycles.

Design Process

Creating emotional target

First, I collected vast amount of references, including music and art, I used these references to create a imaginary game trailer, it’s a potentially trailer but I could only afford to make a script so that’s what I did.

This imaginary trailer serves as a “Emotional target”, it’s an anchor point that captures essential feelings of the dungeon alchemist, so it could keep me from forgetting these feelings and lost in the details of the development. It keeps me from repeatedly changing direction of the design.

Prototyping

I primarily chose the paper based prototyping set up, with various of tokens.

In here, I tested two core mechanics, which is potion crafting system:

And dungeon exploring system, with auto battler: