Sun vs Moon: splitting the shop in half

Alchemess is a game about not being in a hurry, so putting a competitive mode in it was either a mistake or the most interesting thing we could do. We are still not entirely sure which.

Versus splits the shop clean down the middle. Thirteen shelves and 1,040 slots each, two mirrored heaps, and your side’s bottles only — reaching into the other half does nothing. One player takes the gold Sun shelf, the other takes the silver Moon shelf, and the room is symmetrical from there.

You can win three ways: on time, on bottle count, or by finishing your whole half first. Most matches end on the clock with a scoreboard that races inward from both sides, and then a proper winner’s card, because a race deserves an ending.

What changes when someone is watching

Almost everything about how people play.

In single-player, people wander. They pick up a bottle, read it, put it in the wrong place on purpose because it looks nice next to another bottle, and go and do something else. In versus, nobody reads anything. They learn the shape of their shelves and sort by colour, and the labels become texture.

That is not a failure. It is the same room used a completely different way, and watching someone who has played forty hours of the quiet mode suddenly move like a warehouse worker is very funny.

Co-op is the other half of it

Two ways in.

Online is a six-character room code. That is the whole setup — no account to make, no launcher to sign into, no ports to forward. Read the code out loud, your friend types it, and they are standing in your shop, shoving the same heap you are and taking bottles out of your hands.

Couch co-op is one button. A second player joins on the same screen, split left and right or top and bottom, with full controller support and rebinding in-game. Same heap, same shelves, twice the hands.

Cross-play works between Steam and the Epic Games Store, so nobody has to care which one their friend bought.

The thing we did not expect

Co-op players do not split the work.

We assumed people would divide the alphabet — you take Alpha through Mu, I will take Nu through Omega — and some do. But most pairs end up working the same shelf together, handing each other bottles, and talking. The game is slower with two people than with one.

We left it exactly as it is.