At the beginning of June, after 2 years, I decided to commit to starting a personal game development project. Since I graduated, I’ve started a full time job, moved 4 times (across the country twice), and generally adjusted to life post-grad. It’s been tiring, fun, but overall, hard to start personal projects.
I want to get back into game development and so, with a mechanic I’ve had in my head for a while, I am starting my personal project under the working title of Alchemist Slime Game!
Alchemist Slime Game is a 3rd person puzzle platformer where you change shapes to solve puzzles. You are a sentient slime blob created by an alchemist’s experiments. As his closest and most helpful companion, you assist him in making potions and completing experiments. Run through the castle collecting ingredients and tools in your gelatinous body to bring them back to the laboratory. But be careful–you never know what other experiments are around the corner!
It is a quest based game. You always start and end in the alchemist's laboratory which serves as a main hub with some mini games and Easter eggs. In the laboratory, you can also receive quests from the alchemist who is always working on a new potion or experiment. Once you get a quest, you can leave the laboratory to complete it.
The player character is heavily inspired by Morph from Treasure Planet and the slimes from Slime Rancher. The character will be cute and helpful but a mischievous little blob.
To navigate the castle and safely bring back ingredients and tools, you must change state using different factors in the environment. As a gelatinous blob, you are well equipped to hold items and push and pull blocks–however, your mortal enemy is grates in the ground. By standing in front of something like an open window, you can turn into a frozen cube or you can stand in front of a fireplace to evaporate and become a gas cloud. This game mechanic was initially thought of with the context of a drop of water trying to return to its lake. I am working on better words to use in the context of this game.
I am developing this project in Unreal Engine 5 for PC.
I spent the first two weeks of June on the game design document, expanding on my initial idea, getting the project and repo set up, and planning MVP milestones (planning to have MVP done by September!). I still have a lot to design but I am going to be doing weekly releases for testers in my discord community to continuously improve the game at every point of development.
To follow and participate in the development of this project, join my discord community!
