Indie Game Spotlight: Slime Rancher
Grab your all-purpose vacpack and get ready for this week’s Indie Game Spotlight! Slime Rancher is a game about Beatrix LeBeau: a plucky, young rancher who sets out for a life a thousand light years away from Earth on the ‘Far, Far Range’ where she tries her hand at making a living wrangling slimes. Collect colorful slimes, grow crops, harvest resources, and explore the untamed wilds through the mastery of your all-purpose vacpack.
We chatted with some folks at Monomi Games including Kara Holmes, Communications Manager, and Chris Lum, whose role covers everything from turning high-level concepts and design pitches into final game implementation as well as world building down to the placement of individual blades of grass, all about their game, Slime Rancher.
Slime Rancher is available on PC (Steam, Humble, GOG, etc.), Xbox One, and PlayStation 4!
First of all, congratulations on selling over 2 million copies! How has the journey been since Early Access to now?
Chris: Thank you! Honestly the journey from Early Access has been surprisingly smooth, all things considered. We leaned hard on our past experiences as MMO and live game developers, making sure we had our big beats planned out in our roadmap as well as regular engagement and updates for our community. I think this has helped us continue to be a top selling, overwhelmingly positive-rated game years after our initial release into Early Access. Also since then we’ve managed to cultivate a bunch of exciting partnerships that’s allowed us to explore other platforms as well as adorable merch options. It’s not something we ever could have imagined taking off back in the Early Access days and we’re so incredibly thankful for the opportunities!
Where did the idea behind Slime Rancher originate from?
Kara: When Nick and Mike first started working on Slime Rancher, the goal was to make something weird, colorful, and happy. Nick likes to say that the original kernel of the idea for Slime Rancher came from a bug in Elder Scrolls (where you could create a ball pit by tossing hundreds of watermelons or cheese wheels into a room), but there is a lot more to Slime Rancher than just that. (I encourage you to watch Nick’s GDC talks!)
A big part of Slime Rancher’s charm comes from the way you interact with the world. It was important to us to make a creature that could be in any situation, bump into something, roll around, get stuck in a tree, etc., and it would look like everything was working as intended. The best thing about slimes is that they look totally correct even if they’re not.
Any tips for others looking to start making games and how to pace themselves?
Chris: For those looking to start making games there are a number of high quality, freely available tools to use such as Unity or Unreal. Start very small and practical; don’t try and make your dream game right off the bat and use a small, attainable project to get used to the tools and the development process. It’s more important to plan and execute on a complete idea than it is to make a game with a grand vision or scope.
All developers can talk at length about what worked for them to break into the industry and each is valid and different so it’s harder to give advice here. One thing that I know I look for is experience with working on a team and executing on a complete idea. Whether that is building a game-ready character model, creating an environment, or designing a gameplay system, I like to see how people break down a problem, demonstrate their process for solving it, and work with others to make a final product.
What is personally your favorite Slime?
Chris: I really like phosphor slimes. They make exploring at night a lot more pleasant since they have that wonderful glow to them and they’re harmless, unlike mosaic slimes. From a purely practical design standpoint, they also make nice visual highlights to draw the player’s eye at night where it can be sometimes very dark and hard to tell where pockets of action are.
Ready to become a Slime Rancher? Make sure to follow their Tumblr and stay updated on their regular, free content updates. Slime Rancher is available on PC (Steam, Humble, GOG, etc.), Xbox One, and PlayStation 4!
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