AlcheMasters May Survive!

Well here I am again with my inconsistencies. Yesterday, I discovered the works of Alexander Shen (website, Itch.io—Check out his stuff! He’s got some really fun, simple games like Spar, which I’m kinda hooked on, and Good Day, which is an impressive micro virtual board game), and while I was playing around with Spice Catcher (an iOS and Android-only game), I suddenly got a spike of inspiration for AlcheMasters! You know, that AR game I was working on and suddenly stopped! I’m excited to start working on it again now because my idea is actually within the scope of something I can do myself!

Instead of having a map and trying to emulate Pokemon Go or some other AR game like that, I realized that I could do something much more within my scope with the same kind of effect: Use geolocation but NOT a map! Crazy, I know.

Here’s my idea: you can scan the area for things and depending on your geolocation, the time of day, and other factors like that, I can have things appear on the screen that you can interact with. This will remove the “go-to-the-item-to-interact-even-if-it’s-in-the-middle-of-the-road-because-the-app-isn’t-linked-to-a-map-or-anything-and-can’t-prevent-that” problem and will allow me to put in more interaction (read “gameplay”) with the items themselves! When a leafy ingredient appears, you need to pluck it. If there’s a bug, you need to catch it. If there’s a liquid, you need to bottle it up.

Collecting resources would be a simple micro game (a-la Wario Ware) to add a slight level of difficulty to collecting items, and you can get better at collecting certain types of resources because each resource type will have its own kind of collection game. And having certain tools in a limited inventory before scanning will help the effectiveness of certain actions. For example, if you pack a pair of clippers and you find a leafy ingredient, you can clip it with a much greater retrieval success rate than plucking it would. Using a net with a bug will give your tap/swipe a much larger radius.

I’m not sure if I would still include fights and things like that, but I would love to try to add that in, blocking, dodging, and swiping to attack with different types of weapons that you can imbue with special traits using the potions you create… I feel like that would help the game a lot so it’s not just selling potions and collecting stuff. It would also give money a reason for existing—you could buy equipment to adventure with… Hmm. I guess I’ll just have to see how scope plays in when I get the basics finished.

The only thing I would need real help with is the art. I have a couple of artists that I would love to approach about working with on game art, but I need to collect enough money to pay them for their work first. I am getting a new job in a couple weeks, which should help with that, so depending on how quickly I’m able to make progress on the game, maybe by the time I’m ready to approach artists, I will have saved enough money to offer to them… But I guess we’ll see!

At any rate, I’m excited and now I only want to work on my ideas because that’s when I actually get stuff done! And maybe I’ll have something to show for my work so this blog isn’t so dead. Again, I guess we’ll see!