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Heavy Metal Alchemist's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #84 | 3.455 | 3.455 |
| Innovation | #214 | 2.727 | 2.727 |
| Graphics | #222 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Theme interpretation | #244 | 2.727 | 2.727 |
| Overall | #258 | 2.727 | 2.727 |
| Gameplay | #262 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/simonsickle/heavy-metal-alchemist
Game description
Heavy Metal Alchemist
What happens when alchemy meets heavy metal? You get Heavy Metal Alchemist—a crafting game that cranks the volume up to 11 and adds a devilish twist!
You play as Alec, a double-kick drum-loving bard with a passion for music and mayhem. Sick of the boring, conventional methods of alchemy, Alec decides to revolutionize potion-making by channeling the unholy power of metal and a little help from… down below. With your shredding skills and a summoning pentagram at your disposal, you’re ready to craft creations the world has never seen.
Will you rise to become the ultimate Heavy Metal Alchemist?
Gameplay
The alchemical magic starts here:
Discover recipes: Drag items into the summoning circle and experiment to unlock new combinations.
Invoke rituals: Channel the fiery energy of hell to summon raw elements.
Master the rhythm (WIP): Complete a rhythm-based mini-game to craft your masterpiece. This unfortunately didn't get completed during the jam, but was a goal.
Repeat and dominate: Experiment, refine, and rock your way to ultimate power.
AI Disclosure
We believe in transparency, so here’s how AI contributed to this jam:
Art: Backgrounds on the title and crafting screens are AI-generated using Flux1-dev (planned for replacement in the full release). Music: Current tracks are generated using Suno (to be replaced for full release). Design: Some recipe concepts were inspired with help from ChatGPT.
Get ready to rock, summon, and craft your way to godlike alchemical power. Unleash your inner metalhead and dominate the summoning circle!
Theme interpretation
We interpreted the theme very literally and made the recipes required to create things a secret. We also hid items behind "cheat codes" and in the asset art where possible to get the player to start looking for secrets within the game.
Wildcards used (optional)
Let players break the rules with things like infinite lives or invincibility
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Comments
Interesting game entry with a fun theme.
I wasn't able to decipher any of the artwork or extract any clues to find more than 14 of the secrets.
The gameplay almost felt like a calculator that asks you to guess a random number within a range and could only tell you if you were right or wrong. When you finally get a right answer your reward is to try to guess within an exponentially larger range for the next one. After 14 I was tempted to calculate the number of possibilities but I am pretty certain that it may end up being more than the number of atoms in the universe. Some of the items combined intutively and unlocked a new secret, though many combinations that produce something in our known world had no effect in the game, so after a bit I just started mashing without a clue.
Shows lots of promise though, I could imagine all sorts of ways that clues could be revealed in the game or interesting reactions that could happen. I could imagine this being really fun too with the rhythm mechanic you were describing. Also I could imagine animations or art that gave some clues, or at least give a hint that you were on the right track. Overall Nice work!
What you expect from the alchemy game. Incorporating the rhythm is a fun idea tho.
For me personally it just took too much time to get the result when hitting "Begin ritual". Also some hints or a tutorial would be great for some of the first transmutations. The AI music is also kinda repetitive, good call to replace that.
Amazing what you can get with AI. Music sounded pretty good. I liked the concept a lot but I think I needed more of a guide as to how I could unlock more recipes. I got to 8 or 9 unlocks and then it started to feel like I was doing this aimlessly and failing quite a lot. With a few small tweaks or additions though this could be a pretty cool crafting game, so you've got a good base to work from here. Nice submission, good job.
I do like the music and the gameplay reminds me of that one game Infinite Craft. However, I would love to see you add the musical rhythm element into this game, that sounds more interesting. Keep it up!
I like the story, the concept and the dissolve shader! But gameplay-wise I feel like I played this before, and as the only way to progress seemed to be systematically trying everything, I stopped at 7/28.
Good music and it reminds me a bit of Little Alchemy but I found it hard in this game to find new items to craft with. Would be nice to have some sort of hint or system to help with that.
Cool concept! Nice use for generative AI, even though my ears sometimes bleed when hearing AI sing xD. Visuals are okay, but the game is missing some quality of life. (Drag and Drop + slow ritual makes this take a very long time, I stopped after 2 new items and 30 tries) ;)
Cool concept! I wish I had the ability to either track which combinations I've tried. Would be neat if the music tied directly into the current combination.
A fun alchemy game with nice music and visuals! Good work!
A classic alchemy game — takes me back to my childhood! The 'ritual' feels quite drawn out since the game requires constant combination attempts, and the animations make it take even longer. The music is cool, though it does have a noticeable Suno. An interesting mix of nostalgic gameplay and heavy music
It's good
The music is beautiful but I don't understand the game play
like the idea but needs something that indicates what combinations are possible - could be hints, e.g. when combos don't work instead of 'that didnt work' could be if if was eg water+earth: 'that didnt work, but there are some water combos remaining' - because right now its just random search. And/or each combo that fails should be visibly marked, e.g. when you put water on, have all the ones that have already failed go grayscale, because currently have to do a boring 'try every combo, in the same order: 1 + 2, 1+3, 1+4 ... 2+3, 2+4' etc otherwise no way to know which youve done, and it ends up just being a grind.
The music was really good (even though I found out later it was AI generated). The game reminded me of "Infinite Craft". I wish the feedback loop was quicker so I can combine items faster.
Very unique concept for this one! It feels like a combination of "Little Alchemy" and Satan (lol). My only suggestion would've been to give a bit more guidance on how to make recipes, but other than that, solid entry!
Cool concept, and I love the use of AI music, but for me, on chromium, it is a bit laggy, and hovers at ~600% CPU usage, and the github repo was missing some scripts, so I couldn't run it locally.
Using the konami code is cool too.
interesting, I’ll try to download the repo and open it from scratch. Everything should be there, but maybe something is gitignored that shouldn’t be
I think it might just be godot being weird, it works if I open it in the editor first, then the CPU usage is ~15%.
Good game! Maybe you could add a recipe hint or reduce the time for the negative ritual response, sometimes it is annoying to wait a second before realising that the combination is wrong. Good job even if AI was used
Thanks for the feedback!
In a future version I think I’d burn up the ritual items all at once instead of sequentially, I just couldn’t make it look good and focused on other things. I also wanted to do outlines of the items that were locked to give a hint of where things were going
Really cool energy on the game and I love the use of AI the art is really nice and music is cool and vibes well great way to prototype an idea. The music is great and a lot of fun. I got somewhat confused by the 5 slots and ended up getting stuck on how to create things throwing lots of combinations that didn't seem to work. Once I saw on Github all the recipes were two items only it made a lot more sense. Otherwise I love the vibes of this game, I just think it would be better with a little more hints towards how the recipes are structured or something indicating that recipes don't yet use the five fold thing. Overall a cool little crafting game with nice animation and UI.
Thanks for the feedback! We were originally going to have a lot more items with different stages / levels of combos but we ran out of time on the artwork :/
If we continue this idea in the future, we probably will change a lot of the items to be music related items (like kick drum + kick drum == double kick) and add a rhythm game to some nice tracks. That was the goal but we pivoted into this idea on the last week after our first idea didn't work out
Good idea. reminds me of infinite craft. Wish there was more craftable items.
thanks for the feedback! If we expand in the future we’d probably change the items to be more musically themed and would have more, we just didn’t have enough time for the art to get finished.
There would also be a rhythm game component, but we ran out of time
Scale was off inside of the browser. We had the same problem and it was fixed for us by changing the Project settings Display -> Window -> Stretch -> Mode = "canvas_items" and then changing the Export settings of HTML -> Canvas Resize Policy = "Adaptive"
Liked the animation of the ingredient disappearing, really gave the impression the ingredients were being burned up in the ritual
It wasn't clear if location of each item was important or not
Really like the art, dust bunnies was hilarious!
thanks for the tip on the canvas, I have been pulling my hair out trying to fix it! I’ll do a hotfix for it tomorrow
Also thank you for the detailed feedback! This was my first game so I’m happy to get any and all!