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Other game jams will sometimes have a theme like "You Only Shoot Backwards" or "Rewind Time" -- but Alchemy Jam doesn't have this kind of constraint, only the animated asset that wins in the vote -You can make any kind of game with it!

Definitely recommend going back to check out previous jams to see how people used the asset in different ways

On December 16th (one week before the jam starts), there will be a vote for the asset that looks like this:

After everyone votes, the winner will be the "THEME ASSET" for the jam, and everyone uses that asset in their games

Beyond that, you create everything yourself or source free/licensed assets to use

Sorry that the wording is confusing there. I extended Alchemy Jam every winter because of the holidays

Instead of the normal 8-day jam, this one's extended to a full month from Dec 23rd to Jan 23rd.

Not mandatory!

You're allowed to recreate the asset in a new style or even in 3D! 

Just try to make it clear that it's based on the theme asset

Love the creative use of the prompt and great character design! I also loved the music... and couldn't help but move-along with the beat of the bass strings, Curse of the Necrodancer style. It kind of worked because sometimes I had to be super careful and pixel-perfect. I think the hitbox was a little punishing cus it seemed to be very sensitive about how much overlap it could have with your hat before it triggered. just a few pixels smaller would have felt a lot nicer. Overall this was really awesome  though. THe sensitive spike hitboxes made the stakes feel even higher haha. Overall really fun and the 5-ish minute playtime to victory felt short and sweet. Great job!

the aesthetic and atmosphere is soooo good, it gives me some vibes like the liminal space in the hallways of Severance the show. When I went through the door and saw the colored vases and then the inkwells... i was like 'ooooh what's gonna happen here?' expecting a big puzzle twist, but I didn't quite find one 

I'd love to see what kinds of puzzles there could be if the keys/doors had some color coded mechanic instead of brute forcing through keys to open (that's just the optimal path i did -- there may have been a way to detect which key to use and i missed it?) 

There's mystery, intrigue, and a TON of appeal here. I was super interested to know more about this world of locked doors....  the music definitely makes me think "something strange is going on in this universe" and i'm here for it. Great job!

Who's ready for the next great vandalism-themed mario party spinoff? :D Unless this is true cartistry... and we're being hired by the clients to decorate their cars? Cus I used the 'peek' mechanic but couldn't find any impact and I think the patrolling guy went to sleep. But the threat of a stealth mechanic is interesting and the camera motion was smo.O.th!!

This was very fun and overall well done!! I'm not sure about the scoring though haha. 3 levels, 3 strategies. First was drawing almost the entire thing in focus mode before i realized my mistake lol. If there's ever a record for LOWEST score i might take the prize with 0.05%. That brings me to round 2 where I'm not sure if that's 0.05% or 5% after all, cus round 2i did carefully tracing and still only scored 0.75%. Round 3 was the scribble strat and I got 0.48! 

Super well done and I enjoyed it all

Awesome concept! it's cool how a simple twist like "what if you bought upgrades with keys instead of gold coins" already feels like an interesting world. Loved the little hamster character and the intro cutscene. Gameplay felt like a standard idle TD but I think I wanted a little more like the kind with active clicking +1 key per click, or deal damage to enemies by clicking on them too.

I ran into some problems at first building two cannons on the left and then discovering there's a right side being attacked... I think it should be a bit more forgiving so I could recover without game over right away. Most TD games you lose a life per enemy that reaches... so if I lost 3/10 lives instead of Game over, i could have adapted and kept going into level 2!

Then that brings me to the technical aspect which was the main problem replaying. I think a few variables weren't getting reset: the central key level stayed, and the cannons I built became unclickable spots. Eventually all slots got blocked and the game ended as soon as the monsters spawned.

I'm very impressed @tbleazy got to level 20!? Now I'm curious what is the optimal build order to get past the first few lvls

Wowwww that was awesome!!! Combat and spellcasting felt so visceral and you were right about the haptic feedback making it feel extra juicy. I loved the way the fireball had a acceleration kick to it, you could feel the impact. The time stop and dash also felt super powerful. Movement felt really good overall, maybe wall slide felt a little tricky and you'll see a few parts I got clipped into a wall for a moment (was able to get out with dash eventually). One other visual suggestion cus this kaizo'd me the first time 😂

Great job this is suppper polished and a great assortment of level designs. Interesting, satisfying, and challenging. And a very impressive variety in such a short amount of time. Spikes, multiple monsters, dash-platform challenges, wall jump segments, secret reward areas... it had it all! The maze at the end where I died was really intense. I think one thing that would make this instantly 100x better, at least for level 1, is create abundant checkpoints because it was quite a lot to get sent back to a full reset. I wanted to keep progressing!!! but I felt unsure I would get as far as I did again, so I stopped the video there. I do love platformers and this was a lot of fun but I'm not a kaizo player haha. Amazing work!!!! Can't wait to see where you take this

First 5 min review. love the visuals and the transition effects! I keep forgetting that first thing to do is check the shops and buy some equipment. Longsword is the way! I didnt get a chance to try an armor one instead. But man getting pwned by a slime before I figured it out made me feel like a weakling! Felt good to get revenge on a rat at least in my next run. Still didn't make much progress because I got softlocked at the small hut. I'll definitely try again and see if i ccan bypass the hut or if it was a key location. Very well done and felt so authentic to the dungeon crawler genre! Great work

WOww intro cutscene and a full game loop & ending!! is very very impressive . I loved the art style and concept for this... roguelike lockpicking??? Very creative and interesting. The sound design is excellent and satisfying. I reallyy wanted to complete the game but I began getting a bit bored of the lockpicking loop by the 3rd fairy. Once I ran out of magic spells and had to brute force the lockpicks, it made me craving more decisions/game mechanics as as player

But as a whole the game was super charming and well crafted, gg wp!

THAT MUSIC HAS SUCH AN AMAZING RIFF AT THE END OF THE LOOP!!! SOoo good. I kept playing just to hear it another couple times haha, incredible

Tough physics game! you'll see me struggle haha. My video capture got messed up and the first minute is glitched, but it was just me struggling on the beach ball haha. I managed to get to the skull and crossbones flag and then a huuuge backtrack made me quit haha. But i had a fun time while playing! it took a lot of concentration but it was very satisfying to make it past the jumps! Great job

Wow really cool! Alchemy Jam's first ever 'physical' game! Very creative ideas there and I like the concept of roleplaying as a moth and incorporating tarot!

I struggled a bit with the physics as well but overall it was really fun and challenging for my playtime. the physics would have been more fun to master if it was less punishing. the full game reset was rough, and especially losing the walljump i was a bit discouraged to try again. very tough platforming and getting the jumps quickly felt great. i did some speedrun tech to skip some monster lol. Great job!

totally rad and loved the juxtaposition between the cute kawaii character wielding a kill gun  ( -_•)╦̵̵̿╤─

it's a great experience from start to finish, a little bit challenging, the friction felt a bit slippery, but in a good way-- i had to master the 'feel' of the character and it wasn't too hard -- the jetpack was the trickiest part!! You move so fast in the air without friction!

ALso loved the fanfare at the ending. Great job!

Really cool mechanic idea! I also liked the enemy doors. Even though the gameplay is basic they are still somewhat scary and menacing.

I also got the black screen bug then i accidentally lost all my keys! Fighting those doors is tough with just one which really emphasized how important retrieval is.. might be too difficult to get them back without taking damage with the current movement speed.

Shows a lot of promise conceptually and gave me nostalgia from a game I played as a little kid. If you want to check out a free retro game that could be inspiring, check out God of Thunder :D it's free on steam and might inspire some game ideas to expand this 'thrown ammo' concept!

Hey not a bad start! Getting started on a project when things are busy is incredibly difficult so good job getting in a good framework built up with all the enemies and hazards already in there. Was cool you even had 2 player mode! RIP my milk carton buddy. I tried to control them both but got confused haha the Left CTRL hotkey would interfere when i pressed WASD at the same time so be careful with using that for input on web games (it opened up a browser bookmark shortcut holding Ctrl to jump P2 while holding D player 1 walk.

Really tricky but interesting controls! A little rage inducing at the end (i couldnt get to the end) but it was overall really enjoyable and felt precise! The triple jumps were SO FAST though like I almost broke my arrow key mashing it that fast! But very satisfying landing a triple jump on the first try ¬‿¬ 

WOwwww okay first of all incredibly creative and feels like one of those games that could get super mind-bending by level 10 or so. I got a similar experience to when I played Braid for the first time, so i think you're onto something with the concept! First couple levels felt 100% on point and I could understand what I needed to do to get to the next level. Really nice level designs, well until I either got stumped, or encountered a glitch. YOu can see me struggle on the "two blocks" level. Great job overall I really enjoyed the 'aha' moment you delivered right out of the gate!

Wow what a great boss fight!! I'm so glad you made the respawn time so short so you could get into a groove and keep replaying it. Great intense boss fight music too. it was SOO satisfying to finally defeat him! and LOL at the ending. 

I really loved the atmosphere and theming around the key, superb job on the artwork and aesthetic with the lock theme enemies and everything was SUPER CLEAN and readable. Only complaint was i felt the camera had too much smoothing and sometimes it would be lagging behind me when I wanted to go fast with the fun dash move. Only other feedback was my experience was that I felt a little bit lost without super clear landmarks the hazards and platforms start to blend together and I just felt like I missed a path and was running around just to scan brute force. But since the room wasn't too big it wasn't a huge deal and I made it in the end! Great work!!

Darn I couldn't get to the tower, the hitboxes were a bit too big and it was difficult! the dragon animations were cool and i did get a great sense of speed from everything! 

ohh hmm maybe it could be a bug to check into -- when you see me stutter-stepping along the platforms i was stopping to press the button to plant it, but nothing happened and it seems i checked that approximate area while stutter-stepping

Dang i'm sorry to hear that! I hope you were able to exit out before meltdown. I need to figure out a better way to quickly toggle off particles for players to make it less intense. It's also partially made worse by playing in browser... so maybe if I uploaded the .exe you would be able to play it at correct performance 

Really interesting mechanic with the blooming color-swap alternate world. The transition was really interesting and i thought it was a very clever interpretation for the theme. The level designs could certainly go far exploring that mechanic! I loved the character design with the leaf that flutters when they run and jump. Great job!

REALLY interesting implementation!!

Too harsh for my eyes but I appreciate the engineering

[just replayed my footage -- "collect all 20!" i forgot about this... and the NPC didn't talk to me again after to remind me. I guess I was somewhat close at 15?]

Oh yes I forgot to mention that! The physics system was super cool and a really powerful hook to your game too.  i started noticing my bullets getting absorbed at the end and it also had my mind appreciating the complexity that could bring. Definitely a rich concept full of potential. I'll be looking forward to future patches! :D

Reminds me of an old mining flash game Motherload, or Terraria... the more you dig the further from base came you go... this game flips that on its head where you dig 'deeper' by going further into outer space. I really liked that and it made me want to explore. If you expanded this I could imagine fuel stockpiles for deep expeditions to explore neighboring stars and nebulas... that's what I was imagining as I played and got a bunch of upgrades... then I was surprised by the ending cut scene!! The visuals were soooo sick!!! Great job!

Very interesting 3d rendering style, it had a lot of depth and was really interesting to look at. love the physics based game but it sometimes made the controls a bit finnicky, especially the railguns not shooting directly at the reticles a lot of times. i also wasn't a fan of the bee upgrades, cus experimenting led me to having 2x railguns and regretting it haha. I Really liked it when  I finally got my railgun to bloom! Not sure what triggered it but it was exciting! Bombs were my favorite plant and I think I started to get the hang of using them, but they were the most tricky! Great music as well, great job overall!

My game dev felt meandering too 🙃 As I saw the submit deadline approaching I realized the game loop lacked objective or obstacles, but I didn't feel like i had enough time to create a whole new system... so i just added flowers and tinkered on the map. I'm still not sure what direction/sub-genre to take this idea...metroidvania, tower defense, or add a planting seeds mechanic? I'm really glad you enjoyed the game feel of the scythe and enjoyed this mini-demo! so I'll keep working on it!

in this build the only shader doing any work is one that locks the colors to the two-color palette (to catch any stray alpha pixels, or mistakes in my pixel art, like using pure black & white instead of the tinted palette)

The bulk of the effect is simply from having this overlay, which i made at a higher resolution than the game's actual pixel art

I just used Aseprite's dithering radial fill

This creates the effect of dithering sub-pixels basically, the further from center screen, the darker the pattern.

The last trick is swapping objects' layer from behind to in front, so i can selectively disable the dithering on certain objects

This is how some of the raw pixel art looks:

The controls were a bit tricky, which was fine for a game jam playthrough but it would feel a bit too slippery for playing hours and hours, hypothetically.  Amazing game design overall and great job for your first Godot game! I hope you like it and look forward to seeing more of what you can do with godot!

a few minor but impactful problems: screen shake is too high and i can't seem to restart from game-over screen! I have to refresh my browser which disrupts the flow (esp capturing footage w/ OBS so just my last run is in the youtube clip)

First run I picked trample enemies because it sounded cool, but didn't seem to work in practice, I would always take damage if I tried to walk on enemies. Next run got a lot better when I chose damage and bullet speed, as well as a nice coin magnet.

I really enjoyed playing! The atmosphere around the bonfire was really cool, with great pixel art