The Prosses of Glop

At the beginning of the jame, I was having trouble figuring out a game I could do with the creative theme “Absorption”. At first I was thinking of a kirbi type game and he would eat different characters from different decades and the game style would adapt to that. As always my goal are always bigger then what I can do in the time given so that kind of put me down and I pushed away the jam for a full day. 

I went where everyone goes to do their best thinking… the shower. While getting shampoo I thought of slime which led me to the idea of making a slime like creature that can split itself to get into tighter spaces and merge back to… wait why would he need to merge back? I could make it so that when he absorbs pieces of slime his mass grows and his jump height increases too. So without hesitations, I put on some pants and created a new unreal project. 

I started working on the mecaniques and this did not come as an easy task. With lots of trial and error “and I mean lots of errors” the slim was now able to collect pieces of himself then split his mass that would spawn in some little AI blobs which would act as pieces of him kinda following him. Merging him back together would consist of KILLING his AI’s and just increasing the size of his mass. Now the basic mechanics were done and it was time to make the spikes cuz this guy has to have a challenge after all. I wanted to make it so that when you touch a spike it would reduce your mass by one and that worked nicely. Then it came to killing the character when he ran out of mass. This would cause me a series of bugs and a mass headache to figue out a solution. It’s a that point that I decided to give up on the idea of removing a bit of mass on every touch and make it so that the spikes kill him entirely. This was working fine until I came with another list of errors that I couldn’t seem to figure out. Turns out when I was destroying the actor I was whipping all the data in the variable it had including how big he should be etc. This would be important since I want to implement a checkpoint system so that the player doesn’t have to restart the whole game on death. Luckly the fix for this problem was pretty simple, I just had to move the important variables over to another component. 

Now that all the dirty work was done it was time for the fun part. Making the scene. I get this amazing pack from the unreal engine marketplace with a beautiful landscape, trees, rocks and grass. I used these assets to build my level and the game was on it’s way to completion. Now for some finishing touches I made a little slide at the end that takes Glop to the outside of the forest. The game was done at last. I packaged it and got my Mom and Sister to play test it (They  don’t play video games) which was probably a bad idea because It made me think that using the WASD might be too complicated for others to figure out. 

I now packaged a final version of my game, put it in a ZIP and uploaded it to itch.io. THEN I LEARNED I HAD TO MAKE A DEVLOG!!! But if you’re reading this that means I submitted it on time and I’m still alive. I hope you enjoyed my journey in this game jam which I’ve learned a lot by taking part.