Heya!

It's been a wonderful seven months of development since our last update in August 2020!

We're pleased to report completion of all in-game art assets and programming. The script is 99% finished with flavor text and a few remaining tweaks to make before we ship the whole thing for editing and review. Sound design will likely continue into April as we add in our last few sound effects and solidify our music licensing.  

I think we'll be proud of the game we'll have to share with you (totally for free) sometime this May!

DESIGN

Alkahest provides six endings, with four core results earned through 1) player interaction with your malicious captor and 2) completion of each alchemy point-and-click minig-ame.  Mello Kurosol is a player character with an established personality, history, and motivations, but the game makes room for you to lean into certain desires or work around them entirely.  Roughly broken out into five key stages, we hope you'll enjoy the small variety of ways available to reach our endings!

STORY

For unlicensed Alchemist Mello Kurosol, disaster is always one bad customer away. When Logan Apollo, business partner and friend, returns all wrong from a job far outside Lore City limits, Mello must brew four deadly potions for the malicious entity possessing Logan's body...  

Or suffer the ultimate consequence.

Made a few copyedits to our previous synopsis, but the premise hasn't changed since we first dreamt this one up back in May 2020.  We have, however, accomplished a good amount of worldbuilding for the setting, and we hope that comes through.

DEV NOTES

• Engine: Ren'Py
• Elements: Art, Simulator Design, Scriptwriting, Programming
• Design, Simulation: Myself
• Design, Narrative: Myself
• Writing, Script: Myself
• Programming, All: Myself
  Art, Sprite Assets: Joseph Byrne
• Art, Alchemy Lab Assets: Mallory Johnson
• Art, Simulator Ingredient Assets: CraftPix.net's Free Game Icons Alchemy
• Music & Sound Effects: Envato Market / Audio Jungle sellers
• Art, GUI: Re.Alice
• Art, Backgrounds: Mallory Johnson
• Art, Logo: Mallory Johnson

Lastly, we'll be releasing this game under Lore City Workshop, a new dungeonpunk imprint of Split Fate Studios for Lore City cross-media storytelling. Please give us a follow over at our official itch page, Lore City! 

We really hope you enjoy Alkahest and find the characters, magic, and setting intriguing enough to  to stick around for the next Lore City visual novel in our four-part series.  We'll talk more about what's next for this universe after we've shipped this first game!

As always, thanks so much for your patience and encouragement, 
Dee