Jamon Devlog 2

Adding Complexity

    I wanted to add complexity to the game but keep the basic premise and game-play intact. You are a being who is collecting ham in the forest while avoiding stuff; mostly just slimes for now.  As you can imagine this felt very constrained - Like there wasn't much I could do with the formula in order to add sauce without having to make drastic changes to the game-play.  Of course this was not acceptable. I started to think of different ways to add variety to the slimes themselves. 

    I decided to make the slimes a bit more dynamic. Gave them a set of simple rules that could be easily expanded in order to make them feel more Alive. Now they are able to react to each-other and their `environment`. Here are the rules so far - 

• if slime touches slime - bigger slime consumes smaller slime and gets bigger
• if slime touches ham - slime turns purple and begins to `hover?` around the ham

      Just adding these two simple rules made the game considerably more engaging.  Its still not going to win any awards or anything but hey it was progress ! 

    Since I decided to lean towards a mobile launch; I went ahead and began to make additions to the User interface. I exchanged the play text button with a nice looking( I think anyways) Icon button more in line with what you would expect in a mobile game. Also added a few place holder icons for things like leaderboards(which I can't wait to implement) and achievements.  

    I went ahead and added some more characters to the roster , and even made the way the control a bit different to help spice things up.  For now they are all unlocked from the start. I still don't know if I should lock them behind some sort of progression wall. I don't think this type of game would benefit that much from that - but who knows maybe completely wrong and that is just what the game needs haha. 

Last but not least was the addition of some meaty particles and juicy screenshake! The particles are a bit over the top so I plan to replace them with some less flashy blood splatter. Don't worry though the ham particles will return some day!