Slime Game 1.4 Plans

Hello everyone! Max speaking here. I have been the one writing the dev-logs for Slime Game. I figured, now that PAX East is over, people would be interested in finding out what the future holds for Slime Game.

The "too long didn't read" of this post is: Our team plans to continue developing the game!

We have some awesome ideas coming up for the game, such as movable walls, collectables, alternative objectives, and more! These things are currently long-term goals though. For the moment, we want to focus on making the game a better experience overall because we are expecting to go to another (much smaller) game expo in about a month.

Planned Features for 1.4

UI/UX Update

One of the things we got as feedback from PAX recently was that it is annoying to switch between keyboard and mouse just to go to the next level. We agree, so we will be adding keyboard control to the UI. This should help improve the flow of the gameplay and the general experience!

Move Counter

Something we want to do to make the game more challenging is to add alternative objectives to the levels. The first objective we will be adding is a target number of moves for each level. For version 1.4 we will be making progress towards this goal by implementing a counter that will show you the number of moves you have made! In the future this may become part of a scoring system along with other objectives.

Level Names

Another piece of feedback we got from PAX was that it is difficult to tell which level you are on. The simple fix would be to put a number on the screen for each level. While that is something we will do, we wanted to make it more engaging by naming each of the puzzles! In version 1.4 the levels will have unique and identifiable names. We hope you enjoy the creativity we put into the names too!

New levels

This will probably be the biggest change for the upcoming update! We noticed that the learning curve is a little bit harsh since there are so few levels at the moment. This was also some of the feedback we got from PAX talking about how it was difficult to remember what each of the slimes do. At the moment we are planning to add more levels that are designed to reinforce the behavior of each slime. We will also be brainstorming other methods of differentiating the slimes and making them easier to tell what they will do.

Additionally, we have gathered some data regarding the difficulty curve of the game and retention. We noticed that many players play the first level and then stop playing the game. We believe this is because the mechanics of the game are not immediately clear to a player who has not read or heard anything about the game, so we will be adding levels to help demonstrate to players how the game works more gradually. Similarly, the last two levels were much more challenging than the first 10 levels, so we will be adding more levels in the middle to even out the difficulty curve.

Future Plans

There are some other big changes to how the game functions coming up soon. Currently it is somewhat confusing how the outcomes of certain moves happen. For example, moving out of a tile that another slime would move into should be save, but currently all other slimes move before the player, so it would not. This sort of thing will be fixed in a later update, but it is a bit too big of an overhaul for the current update deadline that we have.

In the meantime, I realize that these changes are not particularly big, so I wanted to give a sneak peak into some potential future plans! Keep in mind, these are not guaranteed to happen, though if any of them seem appealing to you, leave a comment to let us know!

• Slime trails
• Undo button
• Water (slimes will fall into the water)
• Movable walls
• Good slimes
• Collectables
• Alternate objectives
• Ice tiles (slide across them)
• Powerups
• Switches and doors
• Mobile release

Conclusion

We (the dev team) are very excited about how well the game did at PAX East, and we have lots of things in store for Slime Game. If you've read this far, add the game to a collection and follow Mantis on itch.io to be notified of more dev-logs and updates! I will try to update everyone on progress somewhat regularly. Keep in mind, this project is made by college students who are very busy, so relatively simple updates (like this one) will still take a few weeks to happen. We may start making dev-log videos at some point as well, so keep an eye out for posts here on itch.io about that!