Homing in on a theme idea

We were trying to come up with ideas that we thought wouldn’t be very popular so we didn’t have to compete with others and stand out more. We quickly spitballed many ideas like, mech growing platformer and machine building management. I quite quickly started imagining fractals when I thought about scaling, but we failed to come up with anything we felt was engaging or had the potential for a game jam that dealt with fractals. I was set on fractals but in the end, we stopped on you having to deal with some sort of liquid. That as you can see evolved more into bacteria/organic spreading more so than liquid.

The first days

I had a good idea from the beginning of how to do the slime/bacteria with unity particles, but was more torn on what perspective should the player have. I was keener on having it be standard topdown with a bit of a tilt, but our artist Jaqobue convinced us it was better if we went with a more true top-down perspective.

I quickly started setting up things and even kept the movement style of one of my previous game jam games Infernal Garden. Also cobbled up some simple cave world gen so there is somewhere to play around. Here you can see the first iteration of the slime visuals and the player character placeholder.

Once we were set on the top-down perspective I started to make the actual “shooting” of the slime. At first, I imagined having bullets, but Nani (our designer) convinced me it was better if we went with a beam-like weapon, similar to the Ghostbusters beam. So this was the result:

Finding the fun

As with most ideas, we didn’t plan in detail what is it exactly that you do. Just shooting slime was going to get stale real quick. So as most devs do I started to experiment with lots of scenarios. We tried things like you needing to clean up a map from slime, you need to kill some sort of slime source. It was interesting how just playing and messing around with the main loop of shooting slime, lots of ideas were popping up. One of my major first ideas came up as I was trying out a smaller map to do some beauty shots. The slime spreading values were a bit quick and in combination with the small map, I got cornered quickly and was frantically trying to slow down the slime to avoid dying. Here is where it started from:

It was intensely satisfying, especially perfect for a game jam where players don’t play games for too long. We went with that design and later I refined it to have multiple rooms, as a single room was a bit boring. Here is the more polished result:

Trimming the fat

Nani was adamant about scrapping our other game modes. The one about destroying all the source (root) slime nodes and the one about cleaning the map. I convinced him, “Might as well leave them in”. We just added locks so that you had to play the more fun level before trying out the other more relaxing ones. Here is what the final title screen looked like:

Technical challenges

Most of the technical challenges came from the slime handling. Given we wanted to do webGL builds we had to do everything single-threaded. This was somewhat limiting on what I could do, so I ended up spreading most things across multiple frames. Things like how many slimes are checked for splitting each frame. I didn’t want to go the Burst/Jobs route as I did with Bird Mail as that took so much time I nearly couldn’t make it. One major drawback with chunking the updates, as more slimes spawned it was getting slower and slower to update new slimes hence the splitting time didn’t follow the designer’s assigned values but was affected by the number of slimes. I later ended up solving that issue but was after the jam ended.

Another area was the turrets, I also separated the search for targets over multiple frames.

There was supposed to be another programmer joining us but he couldn’t make it so in the end it was just me programming stuff. Good thing Nani and I found Jaqobue on the team finder so we can have at least some original art.

After the Jam

To be honest I do enjoy working on technically challenging games, and having a large number of things on screen is always that. I’m still fiddling around with the game, as there are some additions that will make it 10 times better. so Stay tuned. Here are some teasers: