CoffeeSprite Shop

Slime Farm

Technical

To make the game feel more alive, I implemented a modern animation system, that allows for animating different properties of a set of entities. This uses lanes that allows for choosing an entity and property to be animated. For things like scale, and position it allows for interpolation between frames.

Example of simple animation of 1k slimes: https://www.instagram.com/p/DO_cIn7Dx4w/ More complicated, one Animation Manager controlling many entities synced allow for things like the sign to bounce on the slimes head: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPq2jSujpZu/

Visuals

Visually the theme changes based on the reality you are in, the whole them is your friend FreakyChest has invited you to his home, a crazy place where he does his research. When you get there you can see some mystic science, that takes you to different realities. From managing your CoffeeSprite Shop to floating island in the sky, with animal human like people that is a little more nature focused.

Experience

You first arrive at FreakyChest's home (lobby area), there are portals allowing you to travel to different locations. You quickly learn you can't do much without materials/currency. You forage for raw goods, fight dangerous slimes to get unique slime drops. With your Slime Drops, you can finally start creating and selling CoffeeSprites if you earned enough Slime Drops, and start earning money. Money lets you upgrade things like your farm. If you got enough raw materials you can start working on your tools and upgrade things like your sword so you can fight in the dungeon better. Fight, forage, farm and manage your shop!

Socially

Its pretty cool showing how far you got, by showing others your earnings and how successful your Coffee Sprite Shop is. Honestly though, showing our your slimes in your farm, showing how cared for they are and finding those unique slimes is really the most fun though.

GenAI

I used Horizon World's AI generation to create weapons like the swords allowing for quick iteration. Environment generation was used for the dungeon, giving such a nice nature scene. I constantly use Creator assistant to understand the API and to quickly get functionality implemented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

So creating complex code is second nature to me, with enough time I am confident in my ability to create complicated systems. For this project I did what is hard for me, relaxing. In this project I challenged my self to relax and bring our who I am. I had many other game developers talk about that enjoying the experience and that they really want to see who I am and create my own unique view. So I created this passion project, that uses elements of some of my favorite games, like Stardew Valley, Don't Starve, my interest in creating things (FreakyChest being mad scientist type of character) and anime. In the end I really enjoyed this experience and hope it gets interest from gamers.

What's next for CoffeeSprite Shop

If players enjoy my game as much as I enjoyed creating it, there is so much room to grow. For weapons, I would like to create different tiers, where you use previous weapon combinations to create the new weapons, where each tier will have different more challenging currency/material to obtain. I made the animation system specifically for interfacing with a state machine. This will allow for creating many different types of slimes with very different behaviors, like having afraid personality where they always run away, some could run away but have chance of reacting like becoming friendly or becoming aggressive. This would also work for petSlimes, where there behavior can be dynamic and extensive, from playing with a ball or being grumpy they were not pet. Having a large catalog of Coffee Sprites that also use combinations of Slime Drops to make unique Coffee Sprites, trying to find either the cutest or best selling. The list of possibilities is very large of how much potential growth this project has. Maybe users will want a cool Roguelite type dungeon!