Slimekeep

Made with: Unity, C# for PC

Solo project

Module ‘Rapid Prototyping’ - 1 week

Theme: ‘Monsters!’

Functionality

For this assignment I made a prototype in which you have to progress through a dungeon by solving puzzles. To solve the puzzles you have to make sure you’re using the right monster (slime) for the task at hand (Ice Slime to freeze water, Boulder Slime to push boulders, etc.). You can only solve the puzzles if you manage your party of slimy monsters correctly (hence: Monsters!). You can walk around with W/A/S/D, interact with E, drop a slime with Q, and reset the level with R. The goal of the prototype is to unlock and walk through the last (fourth) door in the dungeon. The unique mechanic is that to gain the abilities needed to solve the puzzles, you need to have a specific slime selected in your inventory, which requires you to have the correct slimes at hand, and possibly backtrack to re-equip the slimes you left behind earlier.

Development process

After getting feedback and watching my classmates play, I changed a few things:

I made changes to the textbox, making the text bigger to be more readable and I added a blinking ‘E’ with an arrow so players would know how to close the textbox and continue.

Before I had time and animations pause whenever you were reading text, but this looked a bit weird, and made the timing of some sounds incorrect. I removed this, making it look and feel a lot smoother.

There was a bug in the build that was not there in the editor, which resulted in collision not being detected, so I fixed that issue.

I got feedback that the inputs weren’t very responsive because sometimes they would just get eaten by the player movement, so I added an input buffer to make the game feel more responsive.

The boulder would sometimes slowly get more and more off grid because I wasn’t rounding it’s movement to whole numbers, so I fixed that.

When sliding on ice around corners, you would have to wait a bit before moving again (this was cause of code that made it possible to turn around on ice without moving). I made it so now you can both turn around on the ice without moving and turn corners without stopping.

I got feedback that going back and forth to retrieve slimes might get annoying when the game becomes bigger, but that it was alright in the prototype, so I decided to leave it like it is for now.