Slime Cosmic Game Design Document

Game Design Document for Slime Cosmic

Title: Slime Cosmic

Developers: Ikhan Games

Date: September 1st, 2024

Table of Contents

1. Game Overview

After an alien organism lands on Earth, the player utilizes anything organic it can find to grow and evolve. Is comprised of a body and a nucleus. The player can move the nucleus freely within the overall body of the organism in order to cover more of individual maps and envelop trees, animals, buildings, humans. Over the course of the game, levels grow in scale, the human will offer up resistance, so the player will have to evolve offensive and defensive abilities to countermand this. On top of it this. There is a mechanism revolving around enveloping larger structures like buildings in a mini-game.

Fans of simple strategy games and games of the genre like Creeper World

PC

2. Gameplay

Basic Gameplay:
The players put in a starting location on a map they must achieve certain objectives, staying alive in the process, they can strategically move and evolve their slime. Objectives can be met with stealth or through aggressive attacks. The evolutions are carried over between levels, so there is an element of play style. For the most part, the only thing the player has control of is the slime's nucleus, the evolution upgrade nodes and skills with cool downs. The player can move the nucleus anywhere Inside the body and use various skills like throwing objects out of the body, surging forward, things like that

Mouse and keyboard

• Campaign with variable difficulty


• Stand Alone Maps with configurable difficulties

• Main Menu: Options for accessing the Campaign, Maps, Settings, and Quit.


• Save Menu: Access different save slots; starting a new campaign, loading an existing campaign or clearing a occupied slot.


• Maps View: The main game view; a top down view of a location with HUD elements like current resources, available abilities, etc


• Building View: A 2D side view for the Building infiltration minigame.


• Upgrade UI: Am interface view for the player's skill tree.


• Map Selection UI: A small UI for selecting independent maps


• Difficulty Setting UI: A UI for adjusting the difficulty of the independent maps

3. Story and Characters

An alien spore lands on the earth. It continuously devours organic material around where it lands, becoming more familiar with the environment and evolving to withstand it and thrive in it. The player must control it and carries forward on its path of global domination.

The slime has primary characterization while there are no other characters in gameplay. All other characters are relegated to cutscenes where they provide exposition support for the story and contextualize the event so level.

4. World and Level Design

The game takes place on contemporary Earth but levels won't be localized to real places.

• Levels are preambled by cutscenes, separate from the game's regular gameplay loop.


• The maps is introduced with sort of in-engine sequence that shows points of interest relevant to map objectives.


• Win or loos there is a summary of the map including things like time elapse, main and optional objectives completed, and resources consumed.


• (Campaign Only) The player's skill tree

5. Art and Aesthetics

I'd say pixel art, although at the scale that I plan to work with, I'm not sure anything else would really make sense. Levels will exist at different scales. So for example; on smaller levels, humans might be small but visible. Then on larger maps, cars and buses may be the smallest potential unit. I'll probably reuse some of the buildings, but scale them down significantly later on. I hope to have individual Pixel Art panels for the storytelling, almost like comic panels or storyboards, but we'll see about that.

6. Audio

I'm aiming for a blend of alien sounding instrumentation with other basic musical staples to make producing a soundtrack that feels a little bit horror a little bit action.

In terms of SFX I want a bunch of basics for the levels; trees being ripped up, buildings collapsing, sirens, explosions, etc. The effects for the UI and the Slime's attacks should be organic sounding but also other-worldly.

Not Applicable

7. Technical Specifications

Unity

• PC:
  
  
  
  • Minimum: T.B.D
  
  
  • Recommended: T.B.D
  
  
  
  

I don't usually work with dynamic tile sets, but they also have destructible buildings and transparencies. The slime itself will probably be very complicated. Or rather, for me at least. I have done some work on it already.

8. Production Plan

• Pre-Production: 3 weeks (Concept, design, planning)


• Production: 15 weeks (Development, asset creation)


• Testing: 8 weeks (QA, bug fixing, polishing)


• Launch: 2 weeks (Release prep, release)

• Estimated total: $0.00 (T.B.D)


• Sources: Self-funded.

Solo Development

9. Marketing Plan

T.B.D

T.B.D