#alchemasters

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!

Items now fade in when they’re generated and out when they’re gone! I also finally got item positions to generate consistently! Also also, new icons! Yay!

My goal is to get the game to generate and remove the same objects for everyone within the same area all the time without using a database to store millions if item locations that the user would need to ping. I have this working correctly for people who start the game within the same minute of time to the point where it removes items that should have disappeared if its lifetime has passed by using random generator seeds, and it’s wonderful. However, if person 1 starts the game now and person 2 starts the game a minute later, any items that appeared for person 1 would not appear for person 2 because the minute has passed, but person 1 would see both their items plus the items that generated for player 2.

My idea at the moment is to open up that 1 minute to maybe 10–20 minutes (or as long as the longest possible map object’s lifetime), generating all objects that would have been generated since that amount of time in the past, removing them if their lifetime has passed, and then generate new objects as normal every minute or so. This would take slightly longer to load initially because of the extra processing, but player 1 and player 2 would at least still see the same objects. However if player 3 comes along and starts the game after that time frame has passed, then any remaining objects that player 1 and 2 see will not appear for them. (And maybe that’s ok, but I’m just trying to get the best consistency possible.)