Slimegame Devlog 4: RAMBLING TIME

Or, when I keep forgetting I have a post to write

This rambling and possibly shorter than usual post brought to you by a combination of procrastination yet a desire to not simply let Tuesday go by without delivering a post and in particular a devlog post, as I’d set my sights on having at least one of those every two weeks.

So what’s going on?

I. I’m getting enemies into the game.

I took some code from The Watchful Deep and now there’s a little enemy slime that does this:

I should probably start increasing the framerate on these gifs.

II. I’m thinking more about next ability steps.

There’s an idea I have with the dash that might have been mentioned before but I’ll leave it at that for right now. And I’ve got another mobility idea that would let you fit in smaller spaces. Metroidvanias, amirite? But I do want to do more than just that, so I’m thinking about water. In inverted pyramid terms the ability to go underwater at all was going to be a few steps “out” in ambition, so we’ll see how that works out.

III. I’m thinking about the speed of this thing.

Specifically, the player and other entity horizontal movement speed. I don’t know; it might be too fast. And that’s not a bad thing generally, but I’m worried it won’t be controllable enough. So I’ll have to think a bit about that because it will also impact world design if I have to change the way the basic movement and dash movement actually work. But if I reach a point where I feel like I can’t design for movement this fast, I should probably change it up. It’s sad because the dash feels awesome but you know what they say—’kill your darlings’. This is a big thing to think on because it might involve rethinking a lot of the map, but it could also help scale in a big way and make the game ‘feel’ better to play overall.

IV. I’m streaming some dev stuff.

On Saturdays I’ve started doing dev streams at https://www.twitch.tv/kaikairos at 9 AM-ish Pacific Time. Feel free to drop by. I’m also keeping VODs up on YouTube. There will probably be a proper dev-log in that playlist eventually as well, but I’m definitely not going to try and do anything resembling the one a week pace as with Totems of the Yonder. (Notably, I stopped doing those after two devlogs.)

V. I’m going to start doing some work on the map system this week.

Inspired by a creative challenge in a Discord I’m in (one in turn geared to be compatible with game-dev projects) I’m going to do some map stuff for the game this coming week.

Anyway if you’re curious to see more you can always: