Before we begin, we’d like to address the rumors right now: The Daily Rind is not an official news source, and Mike Apollo’s claims of an apocalypse in a few weeks are unfounded. The Big Squeeze festival will continue as always.
---
Featured Contestant: The Alchemist
Last update, we posted some lemonade recipes and held a vote to determine our first character feature. And today, our winner is the helpful little creature known as Lemonculous. That means we’ll be featuring Alchemist Evelyn today!
Are those goggles?
Evelyn has dealt with her fair share of lemons in life. Years ago, when Evelyn’s husband left her for their aqua-fitness instructor, she kept herself sane* by doubling down on her life’s work researching "The Alchemical Properties of Lemons”. But that controversial work got her fired from her lab and excommunicated from the academic community, leaving her with nothing but a few thousand lemons and several tons of sugar. There was only one thing to do.
Now, she’s renowned across town for her charming lemon-themed bakery. But will those skills translate into results at her first entry into this year’s Big Squeeze, or will her fixation on alchemy cause an even bigger disaster?
It just took an apocalypse to prove that she was right.
In this game, Evelyn specializes in ingredient flexibility: she can quite easily transmute one ingredient to another! This means instead of needing to specialize in lemon, sugar or ice recipes, Evelyn can mix and match any recipes she wants for her menu. Every card can work with her!
And if you’re playing with infinitely-regenerating Cosmic Ingredients (the thing you get for free with your pledge by following us pre-launch), you can constantly “spend” the same Cosmic ingredient over and over and it’ll just come right back. That is exactly as strong as it sounds.
And now, let’s look closer at one of the recipes that Evelyn invented…
"Oh hello please brew me I will be so helpful!"
Lemonculus is a delightful little lemonade that doesn’t do anything on its own, but instead copies the effect of another lemonade in play. Obviously this is nice for copying your favourite recipes. But there are some nuances that skilled players can exploit from the fact that it’s not an exact copy of other lemonades... We’ll let you figure out why it’s not exact, and what that means for gameplay, on your own!
Evelyn has an amiable relationship with the humble Lemonculus she invented. She may or may not always visit the Lemon space on her own, but because Evelyn isn’t constrained by ingredient type thanks to her transmutation powers, she gets full freedom to ‘train’ Lemonculus on any lemonade she wants!
Next week, we’ll share the design background of how a lemonade-apocalypse game even got started. Until then, we'd like to know: how much real-life lemonade-making experience you have? Whether you've only made lemonade from those little can things, created your own recipe or run your own stand -- let's see what we're working with here!
