Inspiration
Our duo consists of a chemical engineer and a software engineer who once thought, "Hey, learning games are kind of great for kids, but what about teens and adults? And what about chemistry?" And so, we began to work on occupying this underserved niche of game genre.
What it does
"Mad Chemist" is a game about gathering, refining, and crafting. Similar to Minecraft with chemistry. The ultimate goal? Launch a rocket.
How we built it
We built it using unity and blender. The graphics were a custom shader we made in unity and the actual models with blender. In order to plan for this we made a giant chemistry diagram with our planned recipes and ways to make stuff.
Challenges we ran into
Our only notable challenge was the implementation of enemies. When we first designed them their only functions were shoot and arrest, and we honestly found them quite boring when we had that first game draft playthrough. So we went back to the drawing board and gave them different objectives and spawns, and then cars to patrol. After a bit of tinkering we found the concept really fun and decided to go all in with it--helicopters, ropes, and then the 'army' for the last stage of the game, where we actually integrated working tanks and planes that the player can take control of. While we still feel that they don't fit perfectly into our game, we think that they have their place and they add a bit of excitement to Mad Chemist.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Everything. The process was simply fantastic and so incredibly satisfying to complete that we feel a sincere gratitude for the people who helped us get through this week of coding.
What we learned
As engineers, we didn't learn much about chemistry or anything that happens inside of the game, however, we did learn quite a bit about shaders and splines for animation--uncommon topics to be learning in our field.
What's next for Mad Chemist
We're going to see if it generates enough interest to fully develop the game and publish it on steam completely free of charge if it does. Monetization is not our goal.
NOTE: The project build is unstable and we've had a lot of issues porting it anywhere. For the time being we are unable to supply a playable game since it's unreasonable to send a 30gb dev build.
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