Slime Hop

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  Gameplay

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  The queen is trapped!

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  First hops

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  A high climber approaches a ? orb

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  Some perks for the player to choose from

Inspiration

I was inspired by the splicity of games like Cut the Rope, Where's My Water? and Angry Birds. They have a single input yet they evoke much thought and stratergising.

The setting came out of the creature. A slime leaves a slimy trail wherever it goes, shedding itself into residue as it travels. So make that the price: every hop costs mass, and you have to go and gather it back. Minecraft never sits you down and explains hunger. You're a human, you get hungry, obviously. I wanted a resource loop that carried its own explanation like that, and being a slime hands you one for free. A reverse snowball. You get smaller the further you travel.

Enter the Gungeon and Soul Knight gave me the castle and the palette.

How I built it

Claude Code, around sixty sessions, one readable index.html, all of it hand-rolled Canvas 2D.

The tower generates itself. I also had it build two things that aren't the game: a level editor, and a headless test suite that flies the real physics and asserts on where the slime actually lands. 226 checks. That suite caught a grid rescale that had quietly broken half the fixtures.

What I learned

AI is bad at level design. The code was never the problem. The physics were never the problem. I opted to stay back and not author the levels by hand, since this is an AI-first jam. Six separate passes failed to fix "the levels feel random."

The other lesson was mine. My game had every ingredient of its genre. Slime is the resource, hops spend it, lava is the clock. BUT nothing ever made the player choose. Pickups sat on the arc you were already flying, so income arrived whether you thought or not. A treadmill with a timer on it.

The fix was one idea: put the payout somewhere you have to leave the safe line to reach.

Challenges

Several concepts got built and binned before this one.

The level problem took six attempts because I kept treating it as density. Too many blocks, fewer blocks, fewer again. Then I dumped an entire tower to ASCII and read it, and the cause was sitting in plain text: generation threw a random launch and built a ledge wherever it happened to land. Physically honest. Completely arrhythmic. Reversing it fixed it in one pass. Decide where the ledge belongs, then hunt for a launch that reaches it.

I should have printed the tower four complaints earlier.

What's next for Slime Hop

Built With

• canvas
• claude
• css3
• html5
• javascript
• mobile-web
• procedural-generation