Sip of Life

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 for ingredients 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

This game is mostly complete as far as the main game idea goes, however, it will probably grow stale after a couple of plays because many things had to be omitted because of the time limit.

I would recommend playing the post-7DRL version, because it has one small but very important improvement: all the places (herb meadows and monster lairs) are drawn on the world map, so you don't need to scan around with your cursor to see where is what. Otherwise (apart from a couple of bugfixes) it is just the same as the 7DRL version. The development will probably slowly continue; if you are interested, you can check the Github repository from time to time.

How to play

Your goal is to mix the Potion of Youth before you die. That happens either if your party is wiped out in battle, or after 10 game years pass.

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.
• Interact with 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 interact with 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 is currently selected, yellow border shows the result of the mixing before you do it (if you know the result). 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. The amount of time remaining is the number over the unit's head.

Credits

Credits for the game itself are simple: I did all the programming and my brother made all the content.

Credits for all the used art can be found in the game's git repository: https://github.com/ramillies/alchemist/blob/main/CREDITS .