“Slimy Castle Defense” was a web game developed in 3 days for Mini Jam 185 – Duality on June 20th 2025. You control a slime as you try to fight off endless waves of enemies. The theme for the jam was ‘Duality’, so the player is able to swap between two forms in combat; however, the player loses health when doing so. As a result, the player has to balance combat and health.
This game placed #9th overall in the competition
This game was developed by 3 people: Mark Helminiak, PietPiper, Clippy
My Contributions
This game was developed by 3 people including myself. I was responsible for designing the player and enemy movesets. I was also responsible for balancing the player’s attacks so that they would have a challenging experience.
To fit the limitation of the game jam (“Everything at a cost”), I designed a relatively complicated ‘mana’ system for attacks. The player has a bar at the bottom of the screen, that functionally acts as 2 separate ‘mana’ bars, each corresponding to one of the player’s two forms. Using attacks in one form, will move the ‘mana’ bar in the corresponding direction, which will lower the ‘mana’ available for the current form, but raise the ‘mana’ available for the other form. This shared ‘mana’ bar rewards the player for making full use of each form before switching, as using more attacks in one form will allow the player to use more attacks in the other form.
To further incentivize making good use of the player’s multiple forms, switching between forms will cost the player a small amount of health. This means that the player should be trying to spend enough time in each form to gain back the health they lost by switching.
Additionally, I created all of the pixel art seen throughout the game, as well as implemented the forced-perspective for the sprites in a 3D environment.
In review, I think that mechanics I designed for this game were largely successful, as switching between forms is pretty fun and satisfying. However, I do think that I did a poor job balancing the enemies, as the game can become difficult very fast.