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Slime Gun's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| How much do you enjoy the game overall? | #1 | 4.154 | 4.154 |
| Did you make it in 3 hours (put 5 by default) | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Audio | #2 | 3.846 | 3.846 |
| Gameplay | #2 | 4.077 | 4.077 |
| Overall | #3 | 4.064 | 4.064 |
| How well does the game fit the themes? | #14 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Visuals | #16 | 3.308 | 3.308 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How long was your dev time?
3 hours
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Comments
That was a fun little game! Loved the squishy physics & sound of the slime. My favorite level is where you need to get the bomb off the pressure plate without putting the blue block on a different plate!
Really nice game, it's a simple but quite unique idea and it works well! I was a little confused by the win condition at first but I figured it out. The audio and font suit the game very well.
Thanks! Yeah, if I had more time I would have done a tutorial level to show how the win condition works. But I think I had about 20-25 minutes left and only two levels, so I just did what I could to crank out something people could play and hoped for the best. :)
Glad to hear you like the audio. I was trying to improve on that since it was my lowest rating in all my other Trijam entries. I found two "splat" sounds I really liked and play them at different pitches and volumes. One splat for horizontal collisions, and the other for vertical. I change the volume based on the size of the blob - bigger blobs make louder splats. I wanted to increase the volume based on the speed at which they hit the wall or ground, but found that to be too complicated for the time allotted (at least for me). The pitch is random just to give it some variety.
Excellent entry, the core gameplay idea is neat. It was a pleasure to play, you made a great job in such a short time, good work!
Thank you! The GameMaker physics really are nice, and way easier to use than I would have imagined.
Great game! The slime physics are very convincing and the aesthetics are also very well done. Very nice how you've used complimentary colors and the sound effects are also very pleasing!
It's great that you've managed to add different stages to the game as well.
Thank you so much! I know my graphics don't touch yours (which are awesome!), but I'm glad to hear that the effect was still nice. I hope to add some more levels post-jam because there's a lot I wanted to try but just didn't have time for.
Hahaha! No way! But I'm glad you liked them! ^^
Brilliant game. I can see a lot of emergent gameplay ideas already in the six levels that are begging to be developed further.
Thank you for the kind words! I think I’m going to upload some extra levels post-jam, and I can definitely see myself using the slime mechanics in other games.
Really well done! Very weird, but very fun mechanics :P How did you make that sticky slime? It really worked very well. The levels were also interesting. Definitely during the last few I had to think for a second how I should solve it.
Maybe as a tiny bit of feedback, it was not immediately clear to me how I could win a level. I would just shoot around and win eventually. After some levels I finally understood that I should keep the items of the red platforms. But this is really minor, and I think you could not have done it much better in three hours :P
Great job and super impressive for only three hours! I enjoyed it a lot :D
Thanks!
Regarding the win conditions, I would have loved to have put a tutorial in there to make it more obvious but just didn't have the time. I tried to sort of demonstrate it at the beginning by having that exploding block immediately slide down the slope and move the tall blue block off the pressure plate. That was my "Oh crap, I have 2 minutes left" attempt at a tutorial. Haha.
As for the slime, the game is made with GameMaker Studio 2. There are some built-in soft-body physics that I'm taking advantage of. In that, I set the slime up with the following flags:
slimeflags = phy_particle_flag_spring | phy_particle_flag_viscous | phy_particle_flag_water;
That combo of flags makes particles that are bouncy, tend to stick together (and a little bit to other things), and flow like water respectively.
When I fire the gun, I make a group of particles like this:
physics_particle_group_begin(slimeflags, phy_particle_group_flag_solid, _x, _y, random(359), lengthdir_x(o_gun.gpower,o_gun.image_angle), lengthdir_y(o_gun.gpower,o_gun.image_angle), 0, c_white, 1, 0.5, 2);
physics_particle_group_polygon();
repeat (irandom_range(3,8)) {
physics_particle_group_add_point(irandom_range(-2,2)*15, irandom_range(-2,2)*15);
}
blob = physics_particle_group_end();
So what I'm doing is creating a polygon that has between 3 and 8 corners centered around the tip of the gun (at _x, _y) , at a random angle, with a velocity based on a variable called gpower that I have as part of the o_gun object. The 0.5 that you see in the physics_particle_group_begins line is the strength of the bond between the slime particles. If it was a 1 it would stick together and be relatively hard. 0 would pretty much break apart on impact. I picked 0.5 because it made it pretty stretchy but little bits can still break off occasionally.
It's not shown here, but I also run a check to make sure there are enough particles of slime so that they come out a relatively consistent size.
Oh really interesting! I used GameMaker 8 and GameMaker studio 1 in the past, but switched to Unity at some point. I never knew GameMaker studio 2 had physics like this! :O Thanks a lot for sharing this! Really impressive!
About the tutorial thing, I completely understand, haha XD I think you did a great job with this last minute tutorial!
Happy to share!
I'm not really sure when they added them to GMS2 or if it's been there all along. I didn't start using it until version 2.3 (which I understand had a bunch of updates over GMS2).
@jhanson Nice job, Firing slime gun was weirdly satisfying, nice sfxs, solid gameplay, Nice job mate :D
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. :)
This is really fun! The last level was quite challengng. Nice work.
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
So satisfying to watch the slime do its work :) well done!
Since I made it, I've spent more time than I'd like to admit just shooting the slime at the wall and listening to the splat.
man I love this game I will definitely Vote for this one
Thank you for the kind words!
I have a feeling there will be a lot of great games with this week’s theme. I can’t wait to see them all!
I don't know how you did this in 3 hours, you must be a wizard!
The slime physics work really well and watching it collide with things is really satisfying. The only feedback I would give is I would like to see more levels, but 3 hours aren't much when developing a game, so it's understandable >_<.
The gameplay feels good + you added sfxs and music. Nice job!
Thanks! Yeah, I was hoping to make at least 10 levels but I ran out of time.
No wizardry involved. I was able to make this quickly by using the built-in GameMaker physics. They have soft body physics for making water in the engine, so it started off as a water gun but I didn’t like it so I goofed around until it was “sticky” enough to act like slime. All the solid objects were basically like flipping a switch.
The toughest thing was figuring out how to make it play a sound at the right times since the “water” doesn’t have actual collision events you can use like the solid stuff does. I rigged up something that detects abrupt changes in the velocity of the blobs of slime.
I never did figure out how to combine the slime together when two blobs touch, but that’s something I’ll continue to look into.