This is my first time sharing my progress for LD55. After my second all-nighter I am only now confident enough to call that I am going to "finish" this and to post something. I am exciting to participate in my second Ludum Dare! But I'm fearing this is going to be another "failure". I am always too ambitious, even when I try to stick to unoriginal, "simple" ideas at the end I always run out of time to make it a complete package. I already spent way too much time polishing unimportant stuff, creating art, animations and UI, despite not calling myself an artist, and now there is so little time left. I often wish I wasn't doing this solo.

Anyway, tomorrow I need to focus on making the game actually fun and add some variety. And hopefully I also find some time for sounds this time.

I did it. I ported my game to HTML5 so that everyone can enjoy it now without having to download and run any fishy executable! While I was at it I also fixed some minor issues, added a mute button and (hopefully) improved balancing by quite a bit. The port took a bit longer than expected but it should also mostly work on mobile devices now, which is cool af imo.

Please go check it out on itch and then come back to rate it here! I don't want the two additional nights spent on this port be a waste of time lol.

Now with that sorted out I can finally go play some other LD entries. I am especially looking out for games that have an HTML5 port. Go ahead and share your submission in the comments of this blog post if it also has an HTML5 port!

I've added difficulty levels to choose from! Also a lot of bug fixes of course. Available now on itch as HTML5 and Windows executable.

Some thoughts on the game's difficulty:

While I don't think Tug Of Slime is too easy or too hard I do think that this game is difficult to actually lose since once the enemy is at your base you have quite the advantage because you can stack your slimes there and killing just one of the opponent's slimes will always give you enough mana to at least spawn one more slime to fight for you. I am not sure if and how I want to prevent that and even if I do find a way I think the worst that can happen is a static battle where no one really wins. Unless of course you deliberately lose or forget to spend your mana or use your spells. Yea....

It's difficult to get this right and I am not sure yet where I want to go with this, so I've released it as is for now and will wait for more feedback.

Changelog 0.3

• Added difficulty options
• Decreased kill rewards slightly
• Increased wizard health by 100%
• Various improvements to UI
• Fixed slimes sometimes not queuing up correctly
• Changed some particle colors
• Improved slime rendering
• Improved and fixed slime attack animations
• Improvemed audio system
• Fixed 2x Esc not quitting game
• Fixed opponent not using spells correctly
• Fixed game restart not working correctly after game over
• Fixed a bunch of other bugs
• Various other small improvements and balancing changes

Known bugs: - Rarely slimes cross each other when they should fight in front of each other instead.

I made a new logo for my little jam game. I also made an animated thumbnail for itch.io, which you can also see here.

The old logo was just plain green text with the same high-res font as used in-game. I feel like this new logo fits the game better. What do you think?

This was the old logo btw: