Intro
Last year I went to Monomi Park’s Halloween Party after the CEO Nick Popovich put out an invite on Twitter.
It was rockin’. I got to meet studio CEO Nick Popovich, as well as studio staff from Double Fine, Capcom, PlayStation and Adobe. There was square pizza, Mediterranean food and an SNES classic.
I made a lot of good industry connections and I had a lot of fun. It was freaking rad.
Funny thing is though…I hadn’t really played Slime Rancher up until after. I’d heard about it. I was aware of it. I hadn’t played it yet.
I got to talking to Nick Popovich and I asked him how Slime Rancher became so popular on social media, and how he grew his audience.
He told me that I should watch his GDC talk on that exact subject, “Making Games That Stand Out and Survive,” and that it would answer my questions.
I would highly recommend it. It’s a fascinating watch. You can check it out here:
If you’re interested in checking out some games that do this well, read my post about Three Indie Games You Should Follow on Twitter.
I finally got around to it about a few months ago. The lonely life of a slimeherd is full of challenges, perils, pitfalls, but also rewards. Slimey, smiling, bouncing, jiggling rewards.
Rewards that will break loose and cause pandemonium if you’re not very, VERY careful.
Here are three ways Slime Rancher made me regret my decisions.
ALWAYS SEGREGATE THE SLIMES!
If you don’t, bad things happen!
The story and gameplay is pretty straightforward. You are a Slime Rancher. You decide to leave earth and go to a remote human outpost planet populated by Slimes.
These slimes make poop. You suck up the poop in a vacuum and sell it on the poop market. The poop market gives you money. You use the money to buy more advanced gear to raise more Slimes. And so the vicious, destructive cycle of capitalism continues.
Slime Rancher is a game that encourages experimentation. You mess around with different mechanics and ranching techniques and tech. It’s not because there’s any particular point, but you just do it to see what happens.
These experiments do not always work out. Not at first anyway.
Early on in my play session, I put two different slimes in the same corral – Pink Slimes and Rock Slimes – just out of curiosity.
I wanted to see what would happen when you put two different slimes adjacent to each other. This, as it turns out, was a mistake.
It was here that I first discovered the concept of largos – hybrid slimes that are larger, hungrier, louder, and more aggressive than each of the two combined slimes.
They poop out a greater quantity of poops to sell, but they’re MUCH more difficult to control.
Always slimes.
There is nothing but slimes now.
It wasn’t long before disaster struck.
The Pink/Rock Slime Largos kept breaking out of their pens. Eating my gosh ‘durn hens. Pooping all over the damn place.
Chaos. Pandemonium. Mass hysteria. It was goddamn bedlam I tells ya!
My largo slimes were running amuck. Largos are big and ornery, they will hurt you if you get too close to them and when you put them all together in an enclosed space it becomes a giant gelatinous jumble of death that almost instakills you.
It was a while before I finally got things under control. The daggum things were getting so rambunctious that I had to boot them out of the farm because I had more than I was able to raise or keep corralled.
It worked out in the end. I finally got the situation under control after I had farmed enough food to keep them happy and got rid of some of the slimes I didn’t need.
Still. I wish I had known what would happen as a result of my reckless mucking about. Lesson learned I guess.
Putting Chimes in your Slime Corrals Make it Sound Like a Noisy Ball Pit.
It Gets a Little Old Pretty Quickly.
A couple of hours into my first playthrough I came across the Twinkleslime.
It’s a slime that only comes out at night and sings at you for a few minutes before disappearing. It leaves behind a trail of chimes in its wake that sing a tone when you or something else move through them.
This gave me a bright idea. Why not put all of these musical chimes into my slime corrals and see what happens?
Well. You know what happened next?
Imagine if a children’s ball pit could sing. And not well. Loudly. Discordantly. Dissonantly. Out of tune, off-key and out-of-time.
That’s what it sounds like. Now you know.
It was pretty amusing at first. But after a while it gets a little bit grating.
I haven’t bothered to take them out though. I guess I’ve gotten kinda used to them.
The cacophony has become the soundtrack to the solitary life of a slimeherd. It would get pretty lonely otherwise.
What Happens When We Cross-Breed Dangerous Slimes?
After a while, I hit a wall in terms of exploration and unlocking new areas, and I managed to get a sort of daily routine going.
Wake up. Harvest crops and chickens. Feed them to the slimes. Collect their poop. Sell their poop. Hoard the rest of their poop. Explore.
Eventually I unlocked the Indigo Quarry after finding out that if you force feed the really big slimes they explode and leave keys to new areas in the hodge-podge of littler slimes they leave behind.
This new area has more rare species of slime that have more valuable poop.
Eventually, a thought crept unbidden into my head:
I know what happens if you cross-breed a slime with a cat tail and a slime that poops out rocks. But what happens when you cross-breed the slimes that emit radioactive energy, shoot out razor-sharp crystals and literally explode?
And so, I stuffed each of them into their own overcrowded, poop filled, unsanitary pens and waited for the fireworks to go off.
Nothing happened.
So I thought “Hmm…maybe I need more.”
So I ranched more danger slimes.
And then nothing happened.
Then I decided I was bored and stopped playing.
Recommendation
Slime Rancher is a cute little game and a fun little time waster. The writing is pretty funny. There’s a lot of exploring to do. The Slime designs are fun and creative.
Farming simulators aren’t typically my thing. I never really got into games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and so on. If that’s more your bag, then Slime Rancher is for you.
That being said, Slime Rancher is a case study on how to leverage social media to build a successful audience for your game.
CEO Nick Popovich’s GDC talks on Making Games that Stand Out and Survive and their Slime Rancher Post Mortum should be required viewing for anyone with an interest in getting into the games industry.
Here I’ll link them:
Slime Rancher is available for $19.99 on Steam and Humble Bundle.
