Sky Alchemist: steampunk puzzle game with a gender twist

Ethan sez,

Me and my colleague, Alexandra Keller, gave up our day jobs as web geeks to write this game, and almost two years later we finally have it:
Sky Alchemist - a puzzle game about transforming impure matter into pure forms, using heaters, coolers, and breakers, phase-specific collectors, and a centrifuge. We tried to be as scientifically accurate as possible - the heat capacities, hardnesses, and so on are taken from real data wherever we could find it. It's set in a rich world - a human society that has achieved "Victorian-level" technology, but with a twist - women are the dominant gender. We hope to expand more on this in future releases of the game.

He also notes that it's DRM-free.

Sky Alchemist

Buy it for £5.99 at Desura

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Business • Games • happy mutants • makers • Steampunk

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The CHOAM company seems to have lent their spice miners to this game.
wysinwyg

Steampunk world with women in charge. Can I speak to a realtor?
Raederle

This looks somewhat like SpaceChem, another awesome science-based puzzler. I’m definitely getting this too.
http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi

Haha, suckers without DRM punishing people that buy this game legitimately this will become the most pirated game of the year!
- mindlace
  
  Aren’t we punishing legitimate purchasers more by making them deal with DRM? Regarding piracy… When you include DRM, someone strips the drm, then every pirate plays drm free anyway. So the only people who have to live with your drm are your legit customers,
Greg Junell

I really want to recommend this game but I have to tell you to save your money.
Five stars for content and art. Really, it’s genius.

But SHIT it’s always misinterpreting what I’m pointing at or asking for. The interface is a twitchy methhead between you and your goals. There’s no esc key function to get out of it’s bitchy moods when you have a tool hovering over a place you can’t place. How about undo? We had undo in the damn 80′s. This thing should have 100 levels of undo.

And the bitch drinks all most all the ram in my milkshake. SO ANNOYING. Like, Clever Game is so clever I’m going to close all the other apps on my 4 core 3 gig macbook pro? NO!

Wait for ver 2 or for the developers to learn play testing or something.

This is what give indie’s a bad rep. Pretty girl. Lips like an ashtray. Impossible to get the dress off.

I will recommend this game to 100 people when the UI is sweet and pure like quicksilver.
- mindlace
  
  Sorry you find the interface difficult; we are working on a next release with more improvements.
  
  What do you want it to do when you have a tool you can’t place in that position? Like, move it back to where it was, or what?
  
  Undo isn’t really viable once your tools have consequences and you’ve already collected stuff.
  
  When we did profiling, the game rarely went above 1gb, but it does consume a fair bit of gpu/CPU on higher quality settings.
  
  If you’d be willing to send me your email address, I’d love to have you in our beta program so we can make sure we resolve your issues – mindlace@eye3ware.com .
  
  Thanks!