Aggroing Cute Slimes
Cute Slimes
I have been bitten by the asset-making bug and I can’t stop myself. After making various tilesets and expanding my sprite sheet for my player template, I kept plowing ahead and made some more. I began with a simple enemy—one that everyone is familiar with—but I didn’t want it to be just another plain Jane creature the player smacks around and forgets about. I looked for inspiration with a quick Google search but nothing quite appealed to me. So I decided to experiment in Aseprite and see what I could come up with 
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I think they turned out really well, especially the mana essence that will eventually drop from their mangled corpses 
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Everything came together nicely. I even expanded my player sprite sheet when I realized that he looked strange running at a 45-degree angle 
. One thing I didn’t do—though I had originally planned to—was add attack poses to the sprite sheet 
. I decided that it wouldn’t be helpful overall, considering the purpose of this particular project.
Prototyping
The reason behind making all of these assets—and this project as a whole—is to prototype an idea I have for a larger game. I don’t want to dive too deep into the weeds just yet, so I’ll spare the details. In short, this project is meant to prototype an alchemy/cooking mini-game I have in mind.
The assets may be reused or updated in later iterations. In the meantime, the process is helping me improve my pixel art skills. One major pitfall for early indie game devs is trying to build their magnum opus as their first game. Without field-testing mechanics, years can be lost—often to failed projects. I hope to avoid that by launching smaller games that prototype one mechanic at a time—then iterating if it works, or abandoning it early if not 
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What’s Next?
The process is coming along well, and I’m learning a lot about both Aseprite and Godot. I’ve been doing a bit more scripting in Godot, mostly getting used to Signals and coding just enough to get things working. What’s next? This coming week will be about smoothing over the gameplay (which isn’t too complex yet) and finally diving into the core reason I started this project.
- Create a sprite of a medieval campfire
- Create an inventory system
- Create the scene which will be the basis for the alchemy/cooking mini-game