I Am A Slime

About Development

The interior of the post office. I Am A Slime began as, essentially, a doodle. I've toyed with making games many, many times across many programs. When I was a kid, I tried building a game in RPG Maker based on one of my stories, Blue Star. Those files are long since lost, but I remember spending a ridiculous amount of time making maps. As you can probably tell, I still like making maps.

Making simple games in Bitsy is really easy and fun! As an artist, I really like being able to get a live preview of the tiles I'm drawing. Working in just two colors on 8 by 8 sprites is a really fun challenge. I learned a lot about how to convey objects, textures, and depth under those limitations.
An extra-large slime sits on a picnic blanket and bounces happily.

I think I spent about 3 months on-and-off working on the game, judging by my records. The version on my website is really early and missing about half of what I made. I hope I get lucky and find a later version somewhere in my old files, but I don't think I will. Plans for the game included implementing some fetch quests and secrets, a museum to contribute towards, and even more maps to explore, including some wilderness and maybe even a second slime town (plus some secrets).
The exterior of the museum.

I remember the museum being a challenge for me with the way Bitsy worked. I wanted to have donated objects show up one by one, but eventually started scaling back to having it just open all at once after a monetary goal was met. Maybe there was a way forward that wasn't obvious to me, or maybe Bitsy has changed since then...? I know you can make music in it now. I used Beepbox at the time and was just planning on embedding the audio in the page, like I did on this website. (If you haven't noticed, I have no idea how to write music. Sorry if it sounds annoying!)
Some of the character sprites that were lost.

The overall look and feel of the game was mostly inspired by some classic Gameboy games. Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! was one major inspiration. I borrowed that game from a friend as a kid and got super into it. I own my own copy now. The Gameboy Advance games are more well known, but this one started the formula! I also took some inspiration from Link's Awakening and Pokemon. I was also getting kind of obsessed with slimes, especially the ones from Dragon Quest, at the time, so that's why it's all slimes. They're good.

I've always found the dialogue in Japanese games from the 90's and 2000's kind of charming... it was an era where a lot of translation was kind of clumsy and it was tricky to fit a lot of text in English. Road Trip Adventure (Choro Q HG 02) for Playstation 2 is a really good example of this kind of writing and a major inspiration to me. Undertale (and in 2018, its sibling Deltarune) seem to get inspired by that kind of writing as well, and it was certainly on my mind as I made this game.

I Am A Slime might never be completed, but I hope you can get some enjoyment out of it, just as I did while working on it.