Sip of Life

Summary

You are an old alchemist who decided to try to brew the legendary Potion of Youth. So you pack up your trusted alchemical book, some gold and a couple of hirelings to protect you on the way, and you set out. You will need to visit faraway places, fight dangerous monsters and make many potions until you will able to reach your goal... and you must make that in time before you die of old age!

Status

For a 7DRL, we (me and my brother) probably chose too big of a scope. The game is essentially playable and I think you could get a good hour of enjoyment out of it, but as it is, it will quickly grow stale, because there is not that much variety. It's also possible that the game will crash on you or be illogical at places since there was little time to do testing.

There is a great deal of extensibility and we hope (contrary to 7DRL recommendations) to sooner or later add more of the content that was initially envisioned.

How to play

There is a 64-bit Windows build that should work well. If you have trouble with the window being bigger than your screen, try to set scale to 100% in Windows settings. Alternatively, you can set the resolution in the settings.json file (the key "resolution", the value should be a string with two numbers separated by a space).

After launching the game and waiting 10–15 sec for world generation, you get a game screen. Here you can:

• Move the alchemist around with arrow keys or WASD.
• Enter the place on your square with Enter.
• Bring up the inventory/potion mixing screen with I.
• Bring up the party screen with P.

Moving the cursor over a square tells you what place is in that square (and you can enter that with Enter).

Potion mixing

In the inventory screen, you can mix potions. To mix two things, just click on them with your mouse and click the Combine button. Green/red backgrounds show what can be mixed with what, yellow border shows the result of the mixing before you do it. Here are the rules:

• Herb + Ingredient = Level 1 potion;
• Two level 1 potions = level 2 potion, two level 2s make a level 3 and two 3's make a 4.
• Two level 4 potions make the Potion of Youth (which wins the game for you).

Of course not all combinations work, but most of those that work are known (the inventory screen will show them using the green/red backgrounds and yellow borders). You don't initially know the results of mixing herbs and ingredients (each ingredient can lead to two potions, one "good" and one "evil", but which one results is given by the herb) and the combination of the Potion of Youth. You can discover some of those in encounters, in the library and so on. You can always bring up your notes on the Potion of Youth by pressing N.

The herbs can be gathered on their respective meadows, while the ingredients are obtained by looting the respective monster lairs.

Potions don't do anything now — they were planned to, but there was no time for that. You can only sell them or mix them.

Battles

Warning! For the lack of time, we left the battles to be fully automatic. You can't do anything, except to watch. If it is too boring, reduce the value "combatCooldown" in settings.json.

Both sides are arranged in two rows of three units. There are three kinds of attack: melee (reaches only over empty rows and only to adjacent columns), ranged (can reach any unit) and "all enemies" (hits all enemies simultaneously). After each action, each unit must wait some amount of time according to its speed (the lower the better) until it can act again.

Credits

Can be found in the game's git repository: https://github.com/ramillies/alchemist/blob/main/CREDITS .