Alchemists of light was a game made as a submission for the 2 week long Pirate Software Gamejam 15. It's an FPS based Objective defense game, where you play as an alchemist trying to stop the shadows from destroying your tank of light.

In the project I was responsible for the design of the game, and helped out with the programming.

For us it was important to make sure the theme "shadows and alchemy" got shown in mechanics of the game, and not just in the graphics. This led to the main weapon being a potion launcher, and working toward a design where the player should really feel that they were shooting potion bottles. Therefore we decided to go with a poison potion as it felt natural to have a lingering effect, dealing damage over time.

This also led to working with gamefeel to make the player feel how heavy the potions were to give a feeling of power being able to control where they landed.

The biggest lesson I learned from this gamejam was the importance of having a playable prototype early, and "let the fun show the way". The game was early on decided to be a FPS-Tower defense, and the mechanics were created to allow for a good FPS feeling, with the towers main purpose being to have a win/lose-situation as well as playing a big role in the narrative part of the game.

The narrative was not something we had time to implement, removing one of the big reasons on why the tower was "needed". At this point I already noticed the fun was more in the jumping around and shooting the enemies with the potion launcher. The tower did not allow this playstyle at all, resulting in a very static and unfun-experience. The sunken cost fallacy made it feel like it was better to keep the tower in the game rather than get rid of it and make the game about surviving for as long as possible,  even though we agreed the second alternative would've made for a better game.