Life and Death in the Slime Army

As detailed in the previous post, the Slime Army is a vast machine consisting of billions of slimes, conscripted from birth to serve when duty calls. Each slime serves in their own way, either raising the faction's GDP through trade, labor and innovation, or more commonly, as soldiers on the front lines, wherever that is.

Today, I want to cover the death of the slime. Slimes do not die of old age, although they are undoubtebly fragile creatures. Though individually capable of great feats, a vast majority never rise to enough prominence to warrant such extravagant things like healthcare and a proper diet. The common slime is expendable, and all good commanders know that.

This fact of life is reflected in the game as well. Though far from a roguelike, Harpy Raiders features a 'permanent death' system in which the slime you control when killed is gone forever. In their stead, you will be asked to select their replacement.

This is further bolstered by the fact that you can recruit multiple types of slimes. You'll initially have 6 slots for unique slimes before they are exhausted and you have to either abort the mission or push ahead with regular, traitless slimes. Perhaps, as you advance in the game, you'll get more slime slots (and deaths to go along with it!)

As far as we have planned, only one slime type will be an unlock from the main quest: Ice Slimes! All others will have handcrafted side quests on their respective islands that you will have to complete in order to recruit them.

As for the actual penalties on death however, things have still not been decided. Our team has pondered a Souls-style death system where you would lose all your currency unless you reach the point of death without dying again. However, I do believe that over the past decade, this has become too cliche.

Another method we have thought of is a flat 50% reduction in held currency on death. However, this may also discourage players from going back to challenging areas if they had died there as there is no incentive.

Lastly, the method I most prefer is that of losing your currency on death, and it is dropped on the ground similar to the Souls games. However, instead of forcing players not to die before reaching their previous point of death again, perhaps it could be a scenario where dropped coins despawn after a set period of time, just like how items are handled in Minecraft.

Regardless of method, there is still a lot of fine tuning that needs to be done. The demo has also seen some progress over the past 3 weeks, but unfortunately, due to private beta testing feedback, it is nowhere near complete in terms of being polished to our satisfaction (despite being 80% done in terms of content).

To this extent, we as a team have decided to move the fundraising campaign of the game earlier, and the demo release later. In the next weeks, we will release more details regarding the campaign, and go through the progress that has been made.

Until next time!