Subscribe: Twitter or RSS

Interviewed: DarkWave Games on Master of Alchemy

Feature by Ben Briggs, August 12, 2010

We’re still playing Master of Alchemy since our initial iPad review and slightly later our iPhone impression too. With both games receiving an A grade we were interested in getting some of the developer’s thought on the title; so we sat down with DarkWave Games to discuss the game!

Thanks Ben and the Games Uncovered team for this important opportunity.

No problem! So, Master of Alchemy has fast become one of my favourite App Store titles; how did you come up with the concept behind the game?

DarkWave Games is a new game developer and Master of Alchemy is our first project. When we created DarkWave, we decided to begin our experience in the games industry with a very challenging project to see the team’s real potential.

We love puzzle games and we are huge fans of games like The Incredible Machine or Enigmo. We wanted to go through this genre with something different using physics, highly detailed graphics and a deep background; all the stuff that could make a game an immersive experience. So we came up with the idea of a game where you can manipulate matter having solid, liquid and gaseous elements. The alchemy background was a natural consequence when we decided to give a steampunk style to the game. Even if our development framework is multi-platform, the obvious choice for the first release were iPad and iPhone thanks to their multi-touch capabilities and the App Store distribution model. I think that with this game and the alchemy background we have created an interesting IP we could hopefully use in future projects.

Clearly, a lot of thought and effort has gone into the game. What was the development process like?

We knew that Master of Alchemy was going to be an engaging project, but with the benefit of hindsight maybe too challenging; it needed more than 9 months to develop, and given the limited memory capacity of some Apple devices, it was really difficult to keep an high level of graphical details and a high quality physics simulation.

We started out by defining the basic functionality of the game, then we split the team into two groups: one focused on researching the right technology to be used to develop the game, the other focused on defining the setting, the main characters and different approaches to the gameplay. Our final goal is to be able to deliver high quality multi-platform games, so we started to develop a multi-platform engine to be used to create the game itself; a lot of effort has been invested in searching for the best libraries to fulfill our needs (I want to thank again the Box2D community; without Box2D it would have been much more challenging to develop our product), and a lot of time has been spent in adding new functionality and optimizing every piece of code to the best of our ability.

While developing the framework, part of the team worked on generic tools (mainly the object editor and level editor) that the level designer used to start testing the gameplay out, and the design team started to work on the iPad specific assets. We all merged together after a few weeks, and then we began a lot of play-testing, performance tuning and gameplay improvements that required a lot of time to complete.

Even if everything seems to be pretty linear, during the development there have been a lot of issues that required us to undo some of our decisions. Most of them were related to performance and finding the right gameplay to make the users able to focus on the puzzles. But all the effort has been repaid with a very good product indeed!

Was there any challenge in bringing the game to the iPhone, after having worked with the larger surface of the iPad?

Yes, there have been a lot of challenges. The first was about performance: we wanted Master of Alchemy to work smoothly even on the older devices, and this required a lot of work on the physics engine, level editor and graphical assets. Tuning performances and memory usage can sometimes be really challenging, trust me!

The second issue was setting the right perspective, as you sharply wrote on your review of Master of Alchemy. Finally we had to create the optimized graphics for Retina Display, but this was quite easy, thanks to the good work of our designer for the iPad assets.

The game seems to have been extremely well received‚ to put it mildly! Are there any plans to bring it to other platforms?

Well, considering that Master of Alchemy is a niche game, we think it is doing quite well. Perhaps not as well as we hoped, but we don’t complain about it. We think the problem is that it is a difficult product to communicate, to evaluate before trying it out; people who try the game do like it, but those who only see the screenshots can’t understand how deep the game is. Maybe the biggest problem is that many people think Master of Alchemy is similar to Enigmo, but it isn’t. Even if the two games share the use of streams of particles, Master of Alchemy is completely different! Only those who tried the game can understand it, and they find themselves pleasantly surprised. Anyway, we think that Master of Alchemy needs its time to warm up and should get more attention as soon as word-of-mouth starts to spread.

Returning to your question, Master of Alchemy has been developed on a multi-platform framework. We’d love anyone to be able to enjoy our games whatever device they have or whatever device they prefer to play with. So, we are seriously thinking to port it at least on PC (Windows, Mac and Linux); to do that we will have to adapt the UI (even if we are thinking to use also the new touch/multi-touch libraries available on some laptops) and to create ad-hoc levels, tuned for the different devices.

Then, we would like to port the game to other mobile devices, to use this product as a test to better understand other markets and other platforms; Android and the upcoming Windows 7 Phone are obviously the first ones in the list.

Can we expect to see new iPhone and iPad games from your studio in the long run?

As every studio out there, we have a huge amount of awesome ideas! We want to keep our artistic quality very high, along with increasing the quality of music and sounds and improving the overall gameplay experience (fine tuning the controls is something extremely important on multi-touch devices).

We have been working on two very interesting games (Ruval Quest and Dreaming Chamber; you can read more information about them on our website), but each one of them really needs a lot of work to reach the quality level we are targeting. We probably won’t start the serious development until next year. For the end of the year, we would like to release a new game: at the moment we are testing a lot of different concepts (we have decided to adopt a prototype based approach) and we will choose the game concept that will result in the most engaging experience. The only thing that we can say it is that it won’t be a puzzle game.

In the future we’d like also to reuse the setting of Master of Alchemy for another game, perhaps set during the invasions of the Mechanologists or far ahead in time. We have a few ideas, but nothing concrete yet.

Where do you see yourselves in 5 years time?

Well, five years is a long time, so its hard to say. As a young studio though, we’d like to have a small but extremely valid and creative team, that will be able to focus on different genres, and different platforms. We’d like to be able to deliver our games to as many players as possible, reaching the biggest possible number of devices and making everyone able to enjoy our games on they favorite console, smartphone or other device. Obviously it would be awesome to create a successful IP, with a few well received games that will help us to stay independent.

We have also a few ideas and a really interesting setting for a freemium social game, but we’d like to get a bit of experience before jumping into that market where bigger game developers rule. We also scheduled a brunch with Steve Jobs in the next five years, the only problem is that he doesn’t know anything about it yet!

Share this article!

Media gallery