Slime Story

Slime Story is a stylized, 3D adventure game featuring physics-based movement. My design process began with the target audience: the casual, working adult player. These players enjoy a mix of mental and physical mechanical systems so I tailored the gameplay to these preferences. I designed the physics-based rolling and sliding mechanics to empower these players to use their physical skills while the environmental puzzles catered to their mental skills, resulting in a skatepark-like locale. Audience profile also informed the tone, heartwarming and endearing, which in turn shaped the theme, “love conquers all.” The combination of the mechanics, tone, and theme led me to the idea of a lovable, round character which, after some reference searching, gave me the idea of a slime protagonist (who doesn’t love a good slime “monster”?). This character also reinforced the physics-based mechanics as slimes generally have the ability to alter their size both upwards (usually by eating) and downwards (by splitting apart) which leads to interesting gameplay opportunities. Once I established all these links, the rest of the game elements flowed naturally and built upon the foundations that all led back to the target audience.

This design won 3rd place in the annual, industry vetted FIEA Design Shootout Competition.