First semester finished! With all the final assignments, I completely forgot about this blog. Whoops!
In any case, I wanted to do a little retrospective on our final pitch assignment.
Final Pitch
The idea of this assignment is simple, we create a game idea and we pitch to the class with a short, 5 minute, prerecorded presentation. The presentation should be informative and succinct and give the viewers a clear idea of the game.
Slime Hunter Inspirations
My pitch is about a top-down action rpg called Slime Hunter, where you go around fending off the invasion of slimes. I’ll go more into detail but I’ll start with my inspirations since I think it will give a clear example of what the game will play like.
Amorphous+
This is one of my favourite flash games growing up. It’s so simple yet to engaging to play because of a clever mix of challenge in the form of scaling enemies and fun achievements.
You play a guy holding a comically large sword surrounded by an endless swarm of gloops that range from harmless to dangerous. The character follows your mouse and has one attack which is a wide horizontal swing triggered by a left click.
Gloops will spawn in from all corners of the screen and your goal is to survive as long as possible. The longer you last, the more dangerous the gloops become.
There’s a huge variety of gloops them can be viewed in a beastiary if you’ve encountered them at least once. The most basic gloop is just a green blob that bumps into you. More dangerous variants include the Meltie that will douse you in acid on contact, and the Void Eater that shoots a shadowy beam that will disintegrate you on contact.
It’s quite exciting encountering these gloops for the first time and finding out what they do.
To aid in your fight, you can unlock various rewards that can be used in game. Some examples include an auto aiming turret, a grenade, or the ability to sprint. These are either passive or can be activated with a right click. You can only equip one reward at any given time.
In order to earn rewards you need to earn a certain amount of awards which are basically achievements. Things like killing multiple gloops in one sweep or dying to your own turret. Awards requirements range from hard challenges to rather silly conditions.
And that’s about it. Deceptively simple but quite addicting trying to unlock all the awards an rewards.
Post Knight
I have a prior post about this game you can read that goes deeper into the magic of this game so I’ll keep it brief here.
The narrative of the game involves the player travelling from city to city, battling monsters and delivering mail. As you go further out into the world. You and enemies get stronger.
At each city, you can buy gear from the locals as well as talk to them to build up your relationship. There’s even a pseudo dating-sim where you can give them gifts and unlock more dialogue as you build your relationship.
The narrative is also tied into the gameplay. The missions you take are strictly missions put up by other people whether from the official guild or from a local townsperson. Because of this, each mission is tied to person that you get to speak to after the mission is complete. You get a tidbit of narrative with these conversations that can range from one-offs, world building, or even continuous subplots.
Slime Hunter
The goal of Slime Hunter is to merge the gameplay components of Amorphous+ and the world and narrative structure of Post Knight. With the twists of slimes instead of gloops and Slime Hunters instead of Post Knights.
One of the biggest changes with Slime Hunter is a move from 2D to 3D. I still want to keep a more retro cartoony style like the below while dialing into the mystical fantasy aspect of the world.
