Human children have a game they sometimes play called "the floor is lava". You jump on the bed, or hop on the couch, but whatever you do don't touch the floor or you're out! What few people know is that slime babies like to play this game too, only they have to make do with dungeon spikes because they've got no fancy furniture of their own. Show your slime baby how it's played. Whatever you do, don't end your turn standing on any of the spikes, or you're out! I apologize for making the map bigger than I'd have liked. There was a problem with both the player and Gary drawing amorphous body too infrequently, so the slimes needed protective little runways to start out inside of. As soon as you're glimpsing one another around the central column, there's a pretty good chance you're both armored up. Now the only problem is that Gary seems to like discarding his protection a little too frequently for my taste. Battles are usually over pretty fast, and the neat mix of armor, pseudopods, encumbrance, and bashes makes for a fun and quick little test of positioning. The fact that a bash can easily lead to an instant win changes the value of the card immensely, but Gary is surprisingly good at taking advantage of this as well. I couldn't play this map casually, as Gary beat me the first 3 times I tried to just blow through it.
I was thinking that, yeah. I'd have jumped right into crafting something like that, but I hit a few snags. It starts to feel a bit complicated when you add more than one star as a victory condition, for instance. Having a ton of guys makes the battle a little anticlimactic when the first dead enemy ends the match, so I had to ramp up the point requirement... but then going out of bounds just loses you a point, and doesn't necessarily end things anymore. It felt... weird. So I started with the purest version I could build, first. The enemy AI also doesn't know how to stay out of the spikes when controlling multiple characters, as long as it's got even one still standing on a VP, which made it extremely easy to fool the AI into taking dumb risks and running itself out of moves while standing where it shouldn't be. I'm a little afraid a MP match might end up having the same effect on some players, which would not be the source of frustration I'd have hoped for, exactly. For multiplayer, I imagine much smaller battlefields, with a central area that's all VPs. Ideally, I'd ring it with fire and not just difficult terrain, so there'd be some really obvious cues that you need to stay inbounds.
You can play it as PvP by just unchecking the "Is AI" box and inviting someone else to play the other slime.
Yea, the name is pretty awesome. It reminds me of those weird translations you see in South-East Asia. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere around the world there would be an adult movie called "Slap happy slimes". I have a couple of random comments: - decks of these slimes work surprisingly well for a match like this one. It's almost like they were built for this sole purpose. - unfortunately the cards don't give you that many strategy options - I would add walls around the border - the scenario is not suitable for PvE because it's so easy to beat the AI. All you need to do is wait for him to walk next to you and then just bash him away. It would be cool to try this against a human. - nice concept and well executed within the limitations that the scenario builder has
Yeah, this probably sounds weird; to agree with you agreeing with me... but the slimes being chosen was definitely not a fickle choice. They weren't selected for this map, the map was entirely selected for them. A monster that's built almost entirely around bashes while also immune to bashing damage is just begging to be used for some sort of special purpose. There are still changes I would have liked to make, too, if I could. Their ranged attack still does way too much damage for the task I'm asking my potential player to perform. I'd have preferred a little net effect, like the one the lizardmen use. As it stands, it's feels like bringing artillery to a boxing match, and it's entirely too easy to accidentally win the match this way without actually engaging the little slimes in fistycuffs like I intended. However, I still like the encumber effect, as it allows you to trap an opponent onto the non-victory terrain and create a combo out of it, so it's not all bad. Overall I'm pretty satisfied, because I think that this sort of map serves as a great teaching tool. To put it another way, I didn't want to offer the player or the AI many strategy options (so I don't see it as unfortunate at all). Like any sport, I wanted to define certain restrictions that each player needed to observe, and the slime's repertoire fit almost perfectly. Anyone who needs to start practicing their bashes or bash avoidance because they're having problems with victory point control will probably learn a thing or two from this map, and once that lesson has sunk in and becomes intuitive, they could probably move on from this map and happily never think about it again. Do you mean for cosmetic reasons, to better outline the edges, or as an actual replacement to the spikes along the edges? After making my last map, I realized the joy of a small map that fits entirely onto one screen without panning around, so I was trying to eliminate any extra attention-grabbing noise like extra walls. However, if you think the spikes around the edges should be walls, then I'm not sure how I feel about that. I wanted the feeling of fighting on a platform where the edges meant certain doom, and that feeling would go away if the edges safely enclosed you instead. Either way, I wanted the map to make you feel vulnerable, just by venturing out into it. Don't you think that might be muted slightly if I added walls? Maybe if I added a second row of spikes, then walls? Actually, I'm not sure why I didn't just use black tiles under the spikes, to illustrate spiked pits... but I guess it's because the theme of the battle is meant to feel like cute slimes playing, and not anything that's actually life threatening. :/ The distinction I'd like to make is that it's easy to beat the AI once you pay attention and learn a couple simple tricks. Even waiting is tricky, since the spot you wait in is important. Lunging bashes mean you can't just play keep-away and feel secure without moving around at least a little. This map was to highlight the learning process for this trick. I guess I'm trying to make a learning aid fun, here? Yeah, that's how I'd describe the plan. Bashing someone onto a target square while avoiding the same may be child's play to some of us, but even for me it took 3 attempts to figure out exactly how Gary likes to behave in these situations. To give this map better replayability after the initial lesson is learned, I'd definitely suggest using some variant of it for multiplayer instead. I think everyone's suggestion is right on the money that this would be more fun against other humans. I just don't want to downplay it's value as a learning tool against AI, or the fact that such a valuable lesson can be fought and learned briefly, rather than over the course of an hour long adventure module. Originally my plan was to include multiple slimes, and even a few ranged ones on platforms firing in towards the middle. I figured it would make things more interesting. You could probably already guess this, but I found that it actually just made things even easier. The AI became very easy to cheese, did stupid things, and the entire plan began to fall apart. As I eliminated more elements I realized that it all just boiled down to these two slimes, and everything else was just fluff for the sake of more stuff. I think maybe our problem is that the AI is always kind of boring to fight against in any SP adventure, once you get good at it. You get spoiled by good players, and then SP feels either way too tame, or like a hugely unbalanced gang-up to make things feel more "fair". Getting ganged up on becomes just as boring, after you recognize that's what's being done to you each time, just for the sake of balance against a live player. finding that sweet spot in the middle is hard.
This was a fun little fight, thanks for making it! The slimes are kind of adorable when they're not mass Blob of Sliming and bashing you to death.
