The Alchemist's Apprentice is a project that I designed for the Jay is Games Game Design Competition #1. The idea was to create a simple game that could be solved (relatively) quickly, once you got the puzzle's trick. I have always been fascinated by Alchemy - the ancient predecessor to Chemistry whereby through an extremely complicated interaction between base "elements," new materials could be synthesized. Many early alchemists tried to mix certain properties of substances, but were unaware of the fact that properties of chemicals are not fundamental, but are instead derived from their molecular shape - which at that time was unknown.
For instance, Hydrogen is a light, flammable gas. Oxygen is a light, flammable gas. Mix them and instead of getting a combination with the properties of both Hydrogen and Oxygen gas, you instead get water, a completely non-flammable liquid heavier than air. In The Alchemist's Apprentice, I took a whimsical stab at recreating the world the Alchemists supposed existed, in which molecular structure has nothing to do with macroscopic properties, a world in which you can recombine substances in a mystical way that ignores those pesky laws of Chemistry and Atomic physics :P
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