Ultimate Intermission Quest

What do heroes do in the intermission between bashing slimes? Why, they do all the boring work! Someone has to buy the potions, polish the weapons and sneak past all the too-high-level monsters in the meantime. And that person is you, congrats! Try to keep up with the party's ever-increasing demands for more stuff more quickly, and see how far you can go before being bashed by slimes yourself. Maybe that isn't such a bad thing, though. Maybe they want to be friends.

Here are your three trusty adventurers, who you'll meet along your adventure:

Anastasia is a budding knight who likes to slash at things, and is the leader of your jolly band of adventurers. Unfortunately, she's not very good at her job of attacking things, not getting hit by things, or generally knight-y things. So she sticks to fighting slimes. Thankfully slimes aren't very good at fighting back.

Barghest is a mage in training who specialises in setting things on fire, making things explode, and causing a lot in property damage. They took to using those skills on slimes when rent money got tight and Anastasia promised a cut of the loot. They can't wait to graduate and get a job in finance like all the other mages.

Dogwood is a fairly inexperiened archer, and a lover of nature. They much prefer making music to making arrows go far, but can put that to one side to go questing with friends. She doesn't actually want to be a great adventurer and fighter - she only took on the job because she thinks they're a pest and harm the environment. Nobody has told them that slimes are an endangered species.

I don't quite know how I feel about this game - it's there, but it doesn't feel like a masterpiece or something to be especially proud of. It certainly took longer than expected to make (though I blame that one on christmas - I have other things to do on the 25th!), though part of that might be because I'm out of practice with making games. It's been a while (kind of, it's only been a few months and I did make something for LD51, so maybe I'm being dramatic), but it is nice to have finally made something! Unfortunately, I was too late to submit this to the mini jam (that's mini jam 122, for all you future historians reading this). Thankfully, decade jam is there to help! It seems as though if I don't get a game done in ~2 days, it grows and develops and takes way longer than it should do to develop. Oh well. If all else fails, it's another game I can say I've made. Game number 29 sounds impressive.

As for the game itself, it kind of works? It's mostly just warioware, sure, but I still think it's fun as it gets faster and faster and you have to work to keep up, I like that progression. And I think it looks pretty, too. Maybe I could've put more polish onto the character artwork, or redone some of it, but overall I'm not unhappy with how the game looks. My one gripe is that it doesn't feel particularly animated; I didn't stick squigglevision on everything like I usually do, so it feels a bit static to me. I really should find a faster way of squiggling things; it's such a time consuming process having to redraw everything twice, I'm sure there must be a quicker way to do it! One last concern I had was about the theme and limitation; it does feel tenuous, particularly since the good thing happening when you fail is more of a moral good (you stop killing innocent slimes) than something that's actually good for the player. I hope the bestiary acts as a nice reward, though, and that hopefully that met the limitation closely enough!

One thing I've been thinking more about when making games is tying them together; the experience doesn't have to end when the game does, so why not make games that play with each other? I guess one example of what I'm trying to get at is a cinematic universe, where characters are the same across games, which is kind of what I want to do now I have a backlog of a dozen or so characters. But it might be interesting to make games where experience in playing one leads to better ways of playing the next, where one game's outcomes affect the next. It's not really related to this game at the moment, but it's something I thought about a bit when making it. If you have any ideas on this, do let me know!

Overall, though, I'm happy to have made something, regardless of quality, and I'm happy to have three new characters to work with now as well. So I'm glad I made the game! And, hopefully, you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed the experience of making it! How far did you get into your slime-bashing adventure? Let me know in the comments if you want to tell someone about it, I'd love to hear!