I know as much about programming video game monsters as I do the exact flavour and consistency of the sands on Mars, but I’ve always thought the chief advantage of the Slime monster archetype is its economy. A slime, in most games, is a squashy smiley face. Why, I could grow myself one of those right this very instant, by doodling a circle in MS Paint and squinting very hard. Slimes do take more complex forms – chrome slimes, fire slimes, slimes with angry eyebrows, etc – but come now, it’s not on the same level as rebooting Lara Croft’s hair to billow in the blowback from grenades.
The simplicity of slime creation may soon become a distant memory, however, for Epic Games tech artist and current Duck Shake Games Asher Zhu is hell-bent on reinventing the homely Dragon Quest sludgeball as a technical tour de force on par with his previous contributions to Unreal Engine showcase Matrix Awakens. That’s the impression I garner from the below video of Zhu’s latest project, anyway, whose description also tantalises with talk of “Splatoon mechanics in dungeons”.
As detailed on his Linkedin, Zhu became director of Duck Shake Games – which has two employees at the time of writing – in April 2024, after around five and a half years at Epic, where he was a technical artist working across R&D projects involving Fortnite and the aforesaid Matrix demo.
Fluid physics appears to have been a focus, and that expertise is certainly coming in handy with the slime game, which Zhu began fiddling around with during his time at the Unreal Engine manufacturer (I picture him prodding a drawerful of neon mucus between stints at the Fortnite coalface).
He’s recently “restarted [the project] from scratch” with “a new fluid solver that enabled real(?) slime movement and slimeling spawning.” Slimeling spawning! You can see it in the video: splash the slime against something and it bursts into multiple, adorable mini-slimes that hasten to rejoin the central mass – like chicks racing back to the mother hen, except that they are gelatinously absorbed on contact. From the looks of things, you can also forcefully jettison portions of slime tissue in order to double-jump. Unspeakable are the ways of slimes. Unspeakable, and marvellous.
The game surrounding the slime appears as fluid as the entity itself – I get the sense that Zhu is just having fun with a prototype at this stage. But older videos hint at a slice-of-life fantasy RPG in which you can manipulate the slime and other objects with a clawed hand cursor – showering it in a bathtub to restore its mass on summer days, firing it around like an elastic band, and “yeeting” it at elven mages using a frying pan. The agonising corrosive deaths of eleven mages aside, Zhu’s WIP footage is awash with whimsical elements such as the slime carbonating itself by ingesting soda cans, and yep yep yep, more of this kind of thing, thanks.
Let me slop two concluding gobbets of contextual ooze atop the pert and glistening blob of unfiltered enthooziasm that is this nooze article. Firstly, real-life slime mould is all the rage among experimental artists, particularly those working across latter-day shades of posthumanism and eco-criticism with a stake in labour politics. Here’s a piece on one particular artistic residency which looks at slime mould growth as a model for networked resilience within communities. Secondly, Mushroom 11 and Earthtongue remain the slime sims to beat, IMO, though in a distressing lapse, neither of them lets you yeet anything from a frying pan. Do you have a favourite slime simulator, perhaps spawned by one of the many slime game jams? I must hear about it, I must.
