Here’s a short video I made showing the different elemental combinations you can make in Alchementalist:
I’ve added range upgrades to the spells in order to create bigger “areas” for each effect, and everything is still very much WIP, but the basics are there at least.
Now that I’ve got all the base combinations in the game, excepting Magma, I’m tossing up whether to add in “secondary level” interactions, such as Dust + Fire or Steam + Earth, etc. I’ll list the combos achievable right now below and if anyone has any suggestions they think might be cool, I’d be interested to hear them.
Base Elements
Fire
Water
Wind
Earth
Combined Elements
Storm (Fire + Wind)
Steam (Fire + Water)
Magma (Fire + Earth)
Dust (Earth + Wind)
Slime (Earth + Water)
Ice (Water + Wind
RefresherTowel Games 
2 replies on “Elemental Combination Effects in Alchementalist”
To count options for a minute:
Currently you have 4 initial elements. This means that you’re going to end up with the number of combined elements from if you pick 2 of them, giving you 6 of them(I don’t know if you have plans for adding two same elements together, but given I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, I’m assuming you’re not doing that)
If you then say, take those 6 elements, and you combine the initial 4 elements with them, you could add an additional 24 different combinations of elements, or you could just be adding an extra 4(or 5, I’ll talk about that below).
When you break these down, the very interesting part(at least for me) becomes the idea that you would have elements that are a combination of 3 basic elements, but will change based on the order you’re adding them together. To illustrate, say you take the elements Storm and Steam:
Fire + Wind(Storm)
Fire + Water(Steam)
These are two distinct recipes for elements. The 24 vs 4 additional elements idea becomes more apparent when you add Water to Storm and Wind to Steam. Then you end up with two identical mixtures of elements that are only divided by the order the elements are combined in:
Fire + Wind + Water
Fire + Water + Wind
If these create the same element(order doesn’t matter) then you would only have 4 additional elements to add to your game, with a 5th possible for when you combine all 4 elements together. This would give you a total of 15 elements in your game.
If these two create a different element each, then you’d potentially have 4(first element)*3(second element)*2(third element) = 24/2(because order doesn’t matter when it comes to 2 element pairs) = 12 elements to add to the game(assuming adding fire to storm or steam doesn’t do anything). You can also add an additional 12 if those 3 element trios have their 4th element added to them.
This would give you a total of 22 elements in your game, with a potential for 34 if you want.
You could also go the route where you allow players to add any of the 4 elements to a 2 element combination, in which case you would have 4*3*4 = 64 3 element combinations, 4*3*4*4 4 element combinations.
Food for thought.
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Great analysis!
I’ve been considering how many combinations I want to aim for. The naive answer is always going to be as many as possible, but I’ve got to take into account the potential number of unique and interesting effects I can come up with, as well as the man-hours that the extra art and code for each effect might take up. So far, I’ve been basing the effects on three things really: movement, damage and vision. I’m considering adding buffs, instead of just debuffs, but I’m shying away from just increasing numbers for different effects, I would like each to feel unique.
In other words, I’m still ruminating on the whole deal, hahahaha.
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