Stealth Slime
Stealth Slime is a 2D stealth-puzzle game about a slime creature escaping a laboratory of scientists, the lab’s director, and an annoying little dog.
The player must guide the slime creature through a series of puzzles to find the right tools to help him escape, all the while listening for the footsteps of oncoming scientists who are searching for him. The player must think fast, take precautions, and always rely on the trusty vent system to keep them safe.
My Process
This project is where my game development career really began. While I understood the basic logic of coding beforehand, Unity was completely new to me. Without an understanding of coroutines, much of the in-game story sequences run on a timing system, lots of careful math, and logic. I learned much about the value of rigorous playtesting - not just for the sake of detecting bugs, but to make sure planned player communication works as intended. I came to recognize that I will not be shipped with my game, so I need to make sure my players have the mechanics and ideas present in the game explained and reiterated to them as clearly as possible throughout the game’s course.
The most valuable lesson I learned about coding and design is that the internet is your friend. Sometimes, it’s totally necessary to try to figure something out by looking it up and trying to teach yourself. Even outside of classes, a proper game maker should always be trying to learn something new.
My first task was to pick a theme that served the type of game I was making. I wanted to create a stealth-centric puzzle game - so I decided the plot would be in a scientific facility that naturally served sneaking around and finding required items (such as keycards) to proceed.
One of my greatest struggles was trying to make the game fair. Early on, oftentimes players would not be able to know when enemies were approaching based off of their footsteps alone. I had to iterate on how their line-of-sight was communicated to the players. Not only that, but their sight range had to be repeatedly adjusted as well.
Throughout the development, I had a massive reality check about how uncommon my inherent understanding of game systems was, which I had developed through familiarity with games throughout my entire life. Not every player could intrinsically understand typical game logic, nor would every player bother to read through the controls or the readme file.
Much of the game’s development involved building systems of mechanics, having others test them, and then refining these systems to be more accessible.
This game was solo-developed over roughly 2 months using Unity, Visual Studio 2019, and Piskel.