Sling Slimey

About:

Made by Dragos Lupsa https://insightdeveloperstudio.itch.io/

*The game is unfinished and the development for it has forever stopped*

Sling Slimey is a tough 2d platformer with unconventional controls made in a pixel art style. What are the unconventional controls? Well you don't move through arrow keys or WASD to walk around, jump and dash, but instead you click, drag and release to make your slime character bounce around (as if you are using a slingshot).

At the time of development, Sling Slimey was one of my (Dragos Lupsa's) earliest projects in game dev and one of my most ambitious projects. I originally posted Sling Slime (as a game in development) with a different name, "Slime Shot", on a different itch.io account that went by the alias of Intelligent_Moron (don't judge -_-, i liked funny nicknames), where i was slowly posting updates which expanded upon the gameplay (i was also posting devlogs...). For the base game (main release version) there was a goal to have a couple stages, each having 3 or 4 levels and for an alpha/beta release i had the goal to have a functional game with 1 stage that contained just 3 levels.

Now why was the project canceled?
Well, with the passage of time, the downsides of bad code management started to manifest, besides that, gameplay wise the game was too hard and the controls were too quirky for somebody who isn't playtesting the game every week, not only that but i was getting better at pixel art and the current game sprites were no longer at my acceptable standards, so logically i had to revamp the game but i was also getting burned out, so i took a break and then started working on other projects. As you may have guessed, i never really came back to finishing this game, and yes, that may be thanks to me always finding other newer projects more attractive to work on :\. Now it was completely justifiable because when did i want to restart the development on the game and analyzed the current state of it, i came to the conclusion that the sheer changes i will have to make to the game, so i could bring it back to my new current level, were almost equivalent to just remaking the game from scratch. The final nail in the coffin was me losing the password to my old itch account :(.

What did i learn?

It's quite simple i could use a bullet point list: 

• write clean and readable code (even if you are the only one coding the game, you are not immune to forgetting what the code does, which will later force you to rediscover the difference between the scripts that go by the name of "WinZone" and "WinArea"  ╥_╥)
• your first priority should be perfecting the game mechanics to be fun and appealing to everyone (or at least most people) before expanding your prototype into a full game.
• Never use the engine/in-game physics to control your character's movement, code your own physics, it doesn't matter if they are unrealistic the goal is to have solid and fun movement.
• If you don't plan on having a music composer, at least get better at making music theory and don't just combine notes and sounds and call it done.