Some items, like armors and baked goods from next door, are currently unsellable through the store mini game. There will be an UI update in Chapter 2 which will show which type of customers are interested with a particular item, among other revamps and updates.
Please send us detailed description of the crash and ways to reproduce it: potion/bomb used, enemy types fought, last action that was taken that made the crash, etc. Crashes are difficult to find, but we will fix it immediately if we can reproduce it on our end. Your help will be greatly appreciated.
To reach platinum (maxed) dungeon experience, you need 40 runs (10 for each levels). There's equipment and items in the game, available in Chapter 1, that enable players to gain experience easily with a lot less hassle, and there will be more available when we release Chapter 2 update.
We do playtest our game. The full slot of bombs are there to check a lot of things, including what will happen when the inventory is full. We perform checks on how many bombs we used to defeat an enemy, in various character stats and levels, in various qualities, with every possible type of bombs that are available at that point of the game. We also check the average pickup rate on multiple dungeon runs and cross check the data back with other aspect of the game, including the Warrior's Guild inquiry and battles.
As we said in our previous reply to you, the store mechanic will get some overhaul in Chapter 2 update. Each items in the game has an map to customer types that will buy them (Shprucia extract for instance, will only be bought by male customers). There are also other values that are currently invisible to the players. We will be upgrading the UI to better show these values to players, along with other mechanic improvements.
Repetitiveness will always be felt in the game, since the core mechanic revolves around running dungeon - gathering resources - crafting new items. People rant about adding new and strong weapon (with infinite uses) for Charlotte to wield, something that we will not be adding to the game since they will break this cycle and destroy the game concept. We already introduced a lot of features since initial release to ease up aspect of the cycle: encounter reduce, crafting mastery, dungeon experience. The upcoming gardening feature will add more to this, trading a bucket of fresh water with a constant supply of ingredients that they choose.
This feature is just one of the many updates that we will be implementing with the Chapter 2 release. There are others in store and we will share it in another post when we finish developing it.
The store appearance will affect which patrons will come to the store. Nobles, for instance, will be reluctant to come if the store is too simplistic since "it feels so cheap" while the Lekumbas don't like when it is too gaudy. Other type of customers may be apathetic to the kind of decors players are using. Players can tweak the decors according to the type of wares they are selling to target specific patrons to maximize sales.
There's already dungeon experience mechanic in place for Chapter 1 which significantly eases material pickups for dungeons, with repeated runs eventually quadruple the amount of what you gather.
This new feature adds another aspect for the game for players who wants to collect more of a specific type of materials but want to spend their time gathering resources on another dungeon, or run the store instead. The gardening aspect is also entirely optional, and players can just ignore it if they wish to do so.
Thank you for your reply. First we need to clarify that the Lekumbas were just as developed as any early civilizations do when they came out to the surface. Their civilization became advanced after that point of time. Their background story during that period, and how they radically changed their lifestyle to be the mask-wearing nature-loving communities as seen in Alchemica Chapter 1 will unfortunately play a large part of the main story in later chapters so we can't spoil things further.
Rest assured that more "colored" characters and races will be added as we develop the game further, and they won't be limited to our normal skin color palette. There are just too few content in Chapter 1 to justify adding more type of sprites (there are exactly one elf and one dwarf in the game as of now). We tried to simplify things for our development time for Chapter 1, but as more content is released, more characters will be introduced to the game. In fact we already throwed in some hints about other unseen races that Charlotte will later meet in the game.
