Alchementalist

About this game

Alchementalist is in development and as such, some features may change and images are not representative of the final product.

Alchementalist is a procedurally generated rogue-lite dungeon crawler. Use the power of the elements to craft your own spells and create outrageous combinations of elemental effects, altering the very terrain itself! Delve deeper into the mines to find materials and grow into the most powerful character you can. Take on dangerous foes, learn about the secrets of the Ember-mages and challenge yourself to reach the deepest layers of the mines seeking the Ember-source itself.


Explore the ancient ruins of the Ember-mage mines, searching for the fabled Ember-source. Fight dozens of unique enemies, each with their own crafted spells and tactics, requiring strategy and reflexes to defeat. Encounter more and more dangerous foes as you venture deeper into the mines in your quest to find the Ember-source. The multi-tiered mines are partially hand-crafted, partially procedurally generated, guaranteeing each run is unique and exciting!


Find and mine elemental nodes by blasting them away with your magic. Each elemental node will provide different materials based on what spell type is used to destroy it, allowing you to pick and choose what materials you take away from each node.


Use the materials you've gathered to craft multitudes of spell upgrades or even completely new spells! Tailor your magic to exactly how you like to play. Change the target of the spells, add splash damage, modify spell effects, even make spells change the very terrain itself, the possibilities are endless.


Hidden deep within the secret lore of the wise, lie tales of an ancient order of mages. Theirs was a life lived in the depths of the earth and they delved vast subterranean mines, plumbing the ancient rock for the magical elements that were formed from the bones of the world. One element they prized above all others. They called it the Ember-source and they craved and treasured it, for it was beautiful, powerful, and addictive.

It was from this desired element that the name of their order came to be: Ember-mages. No one living knows why or how they vanished from this world, but vanish they did, and today their magnificent caverns lie in ruins, with only death and danger inhabiting them. Magical experiments and powerful abominations guard their secrets against those who dwell above. However, their tales and the seeds of truth that may be contained within have always attracted the brave and the foolhardy. You consider yourself both, and you have vowed to find the truth behind the veil of legend. The journey will be long and black and many dangers await. But, perhaps, at the end of the descent, when you have passed through much toil and weariness, lies a treasure beyond reckoning.

The Ember-source beckons, Alchementalist.

Latest news

• Announcements·5 May 2022Official

  Live Dev Stream! -- Alchementalist (Viewer input encouraged!)

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40464669/91d83067988e36518fe342a1641f731ab2ea92c8.gif Come and join me in a coding sesh! I'm keen to have some viewer input on the game, so drop in and give me your suggestions or requests about anything that you see, or just AMA. I'll be focusing on the crafting, alongside spell boosts and new wands. Maybe some work on the enemies and some bug fixes, who knows!
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• Announcements·15 May 2021Official

  Alchementalog #2: A Song of Stats and Boosts (Part 1)

  Read the devlog as it was meant to be seen here. Despite the fact I’ve been doing pretty regular mini updates on Twitter, Reddit and Youtube, I haven’t really written a proper devlog entry for Alchementalist yet (I mean, I’ve kind of done one previously, but that’s it!) So let’s rectify that! In this devlog, I want to talk about the work that’s gone into the stats and boosts system. It’s been quite a journey so far and the magic system I envisioned for Alchementalist covers a fairly extensive amount of unknown ground for me, so there’s been a lot of false starts and dead ends I’ve run into. But I think I’ve finally managed to come up with a system that works well and has the flexibility to contain the many different effects I want to be able to implement with the boosts (at least I haven’t run into anything that breaks it yet). I’ll begin with an overview of the stats system. I wanted both the player and the spells to have separate stats, with the spell stats obviously changing depending on what spell you had selected. Spells can be crafted and dropped into your spell slots, so everything to do with spells had to be dynamically changeable on the fly (player stats also had to be dynamic, but we’ll cover that when we get to spell boosts). Spell stats include things like the element associated with the spell, the strength, range, cooldown, crit chance, damage radius, etc. Generally the stats you’d imagine. Player stats included things like experience, level, element type level (so, a separate simple level for Fire, Water, Wind and Earth), hp, move speed, etc. These are all pretty basic concepts for an RPG-ish roguelite thingy. However, I haven’t actually worked with a system like this before. It’s my first dive into RPG stats. To begin with, I had the simplest implementation imaginable. An array I accessed with enums storing the value of the stats: player_stats = 50; player_stats = 50; // Etc spells = 3; spells = 5; // Etc This was fine while I was simply building up t...
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• Announcements·15 May 2021Official

  Alchementalog #1: Paying Attention to Detail

  Read the devlog as it was meant to be seen here. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently on enemies in Alchementalist. I want to get the game into a state where I can really test different mechanics out and see how the emergent gameplay works, and that means populating the world with a bunch of bad dudes intent on making your life as a player difficult. The most recent one I’ve added is tentatively titled “Nightstalker”. They are void based creatures (which means they’re all dark and phantom-ey) and they have a teleport attack. Now whenever people talk about making their games, I always want them to drill down into the details of the code so I can learn actual techniques from them, but sadly, I’m going to disappoint even myself and not do that here, rather I’m going to talk about how trying to tweak some very minor graphical decisions led to more emergent depth within the gameplay of Alchementalist. Firstly, let’s come to grips with the Nightstalkers. The mechanics behind the Nightstalkers is thus: You walk into their visual range and they “see” you, turning to face you, you then have a grace period where they bide their time waiting to attack, then they teleport to a random area behind where you are facing and finally they launch an attack that has a relatively small range. Now the problem I had is that I had a teleporting enemy, but the teleportation was very sudden and it was hard to predict when it would happen, making them feel kind of strange and not too good to fight against: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40464669/3c84f33d59fa1b02f09d5a3e0a3ecbbb2798f3d9.gif This would be ameliorated by having a “windup” animation (all the featured Nightstalker sprites are very WIP and some animations are missing entirely), but I still wanted something that would make the timing a little more clear to the player beyond just a windup, so I settled on having some sort of targeting indicator. My first iteration was this: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40464669/61b2fd15e920ce5c1ee0793eae66bc7565d1aa07.g...
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• Announcements·5 May 2021Official

  Introducing Alchementalist to Steam

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40464669/f241fab87ad5253377fe1e062422ba0c65d61712.png Hey folks, I've just pushed the Alchementalist steam page live! It's always exciting doing that for a new game! This announcement is a brief run-down of my current plans for the game, alongside a few extra links for you to follow if you like the look of it! So what is Alchementalist? Alchementalist is a spell-crafting roguelike dungeon crawler that allows you to manipulate the elements to create ever more crazy environmental effects! Fight enemies, mine ore, craft new spells, and try to work your way ever deeper into the mines of the Ember-mages in your quest to find the Ember-Source. Features Spell Boosts The spell boosts crafting system allows you to alter the properties of your spells in a myriad of ways, as well as crafting entirely new spells! Elemental Terrain Effects The elemental terrain system allows you to craft spells that alter the very terrain itself! Combine terrain elements for even more crazy effects (for instance, combining wind + fire terrain elements yields a storm)! Dynamic Enemies The enemies in Alchementalist use the exact same spell boosts system as you do, which allows them to craft their own unique attacks! Ember-Mage Mines The Ember-Mage mines are part procedurally generated, part hand-crafted, in a combination of the best of both worlds. Each run is unique, but not chaotic, allowing you to develop strategies and learn to make the game work for you! My goal is to make a fun, chaotically emergent series of systems that interweave with each other and lead to awesome gameplay moments for you! The game is still very early in development, so make sure to wishlist and follow to keep up with all the new updates as the game gets closer and closer to completion. You can even participate in the creation of the game by posting on the Alchementalist subreddit or Twitter and letting me know what you think or even suggest things for the game! Thanks for reading this brief announceme...
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