Pink slime. It’s not the kind of thing you’d order in a restaurant, but if you’ve eaten ground beef in the States, you’ve almost certainly slurped some down. Yum. This slime – “lean, finely textured beef (LFTB)” – is created from fatty offcuts that are heated up to remove the flab. The mushy remains are then mixed with mince to help butchers hit the target fat content in their tasty food products for human beings.
In Slime Rancher – a 2016 game about farming gelatinous, sentient blobs by sucking them up with a vacuum gun and firing them into pens – Pink Slimes are adorable. They’re the most common slime variant you come across. They’re pink (obviously) and have such happy little faces. You just want to squidge them.
“Pink Slimes are a reference to that meat filler,” Monomi Park co-founder Nick Popovich tells FTW. “That resonated with me.”
While it might surprise you to find out these cute cartoon blobs were inspired by actual meat juice, the original Slime Rancher design during development was underpinned with anti-capitalist satire and had much darker themes. It wasn’t conspicuous, but rather mixed in like a pink paste in a pack of lean mince.
The first Slime Rancher’s Far, Far Range is surrounded on all sides by The Slime Sea, an expanse of slimy water that, unlike pink slime, hasn’t been labeled fit for human consumption. If you’re feeling mischievous or you need to free up inventory space, you can launch slimes right into it. It might seem cruel, but if you read the game’s lore, this process simply returns them back to the land where they’re free to happily bounce around again as if nothing happened.
“There were a lot more dark things in the original design,” Popovich says. “If you remember the movie Moon – where that person’s out there and it’s actually a horrible cloning replacement program – it had a little more like that in it, but not for very long. There was a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to say, and I think part of that was like, ‘Oh, you’re in indie games now, you get to do these things and no one’s gonna tell you not to.’ Then as soon as we had slimes smiling back at us, I realized I could say some of these things, and I can have a personal love story in this game and everything, and some people won’t even notice, or they’ll realize it later.
“I still think one of the greatest magic tricks you can do in entertainment is have something that kids watch and love, and then they either grow up, or they’re watching with their parents who get something different out of it. I think that’s the masterstroke. I know there’s a bunch of kids out there who play through Slime Rancher and they never read the Slimepedia, they never read the love story that’s in there, or little bits of philosophy or see what the game is even about – you need to take care of these creatures, there’s a relationship you have with them. They’re not just cattle.”
You can see flashes of this in the game’s economy, which was created by the other Monomi Park co-founder, Michael Thomas. It’s not quite EVE Online, but it teaches the basics of supply and demand, with the market crashing if you pump too much of the same resource into it. As well as forcing you to engage with the capitalist themes, this aspect of Slime Rancher hides another of the game’s messages.
“We’re not trying to teach people economics so much as like, ‘diversity is good,’” Popovich says. “You’re not necessarily going to get that specific message out of the fact that the market crashed, but it’s something that we do believe. We want you to see all the different slimes and appreciate that there’s a diverse ecosystem of those slimes. It might be a little highfalutin or something, but I want people to feel good about being in this world and feel like they’re a positive part of it. You are not in the world of Slime Rancher to do harm.”
While diversity isn’t the main theme of the game – Monomi Park’s focus is on delivering an ecological message – it’s something the studio considers important, and that’s why you can see it in every aspect of the game. When it comes to the slimes at least, you’ll have even more options to play with when Slime Rancher 2 releases in early access this year for Game Pass and PC, and you’ll also see that strive for diversity in the game’s very aesthetic.
“Rainbows are everywhere. And rainbows are pretty diverse. Compositionally, it’s got every color in there,” Popovich says with a knowing smile. “Thematically, there’s some different stuff happening in Slime Rancher 2, but I think Slime Rancher has always had a little bit of an eco message to it. But yeah, rainbows are definitely visually the theme of Slime Rancher 2.”
The sequel takes players to a new location called Rainbow Island, a world where pure black doesn’t exist. “Black is the absence of color,” Popovich says, and that’s why Slime Rancher 2 does away with it. In fact, most things aren’t even one solid color at all – they’re prismatic and kaleidoscopic, even down to the blades of grass that shimmer along the edges in technicolor.
“When shadow hits that grass – if you get really close to that shadow along the edge, which is behaving as it would in the real world – there’s actually a series of colors in between where the light and dark meet, almost like a watercolor effect,” Popovich explains. “I think we did something really strange with the graphics that new games are using, like physical-based rendering, and a lot of new, shiny things – ‘shiny’ being an operative word there – like ray tracing. Games are definitely headed in the direction of shadows, light, and reflections behaving realistically. In Slime Rancher, a lot of that stuff is true, but it is through the lens of this pastel world, and so we are trying to insert color everywhere we can.”
To achieve this, Monomi Park “ripped apart” a realistic, physical-based rendering pipeline – the steps a graphics system takes to render a 3D image on-screen – and kicked the resulting debris through a metaphorical kaleidoscope to create a more fantastical end result where light and shadow behave in a realistic way in an unreal world filled with crystalline creatures. If you want that sentence in non-development terms: they tore up the rulebook, put their own rules in it, and glued it all back together again.
It’s an appropriate style choice for a game like Slime Rancher, which has an age demographic that ranges from five to 75. It’s all about subtlety. Details beyond the surface, from the multicolored glimmers on a blade of grass to the social commentary tucked away in the Slimepedia. It might look like a simple kids’ game, but there’s a lot of depth here for those who want to scuba dive right into The Slime Sea. It’s also computationally complex, thanks to all the physical objects bouncing around and being sucked up and fired out by vacuum guns. Unfortunately, this hidden complexity is also the main reason it’s unlikely we’ll see the introduction of co-op in Slime Rancher 2.
“We don’t have any plans for co-op at the moment,” Popovich says. “For multiplayer, we know that’s something that everyone wants. I want that of every game I play too. But Slime Rancher is a tricky game to do that in because of the physics stuff we’re doing, which is actually pretty taxing on any system. You have to double it as soon as you add another player, and it has to be doubled on each client. Just like the first game, we’re not ruling co-op out – it’s not like we’re somehow anti-multiplayer. But we are solely focused right now on delivering a great single-player experience. And from there, we’ll see. Slime Rancher 2 affords us a whole bunch of crazy new tech to play with and new ways to solve old problems that might have been previously unsolvable. But it’s not a priority for us at the moment.”
You can look to Bethesda games for an example of how physics can impact multiplayer experiences. In the single-player Fallout games, players can pick up and manipulate almost any object in any environment. There’s no reason for this beyond adding a layer of believability and presence to the world. Play Fallout 76, an online multiplayer take on the series, and you’ll see this feature has been stripped out. It’s similar to the differences between Dishonored and Deathloop when it comes to physical props. Double the number of physics calculations by adding another player, double the cost. It’s easier to just glue things down, which isn’t something you can do in a game where manipulating the objects is the entire game. For the sequel, that object manipulation will be much more tactile and satisfying, too, with players able to mine ore by ripping it straight from veins with the vacuum gun.
“We’re utilizing physics and a lot of things that I think conventional triple-A games don’t seem to care about as much,” Popovich explains. “Because you have this weird thing that happens when they announce new hardware – for example, one of the things that they often show is like, ‘Look at all the crazy physics you can do, look at all these rubber duckies, and fluid systems,’ and stuff like that. And then when everyone makes games, they never use those things. Or those things aren’t actually as powerful as they were made to seem.
“The physics in Slime Rancher are far greater in complexity than 99.9% of games out there. If a slime is flying in space and hits another slime flying in space, they don’t just pass through each other, they actually bounce off of each other. Physics actors bouncing off of static things in the world, like the ground and all that? Simple. Bouncing off of other physics things is hugely complicated, and that’s why games just don’t do that. If they have zombies that are all physics actors, they’ll fall nicely on the ground, but very rarely are they interacting with each other. I respect anyone who can make physics behave in an interesting way.”
Another layer of complexity in Slime Rancher – unrelated to co-op play – is coming up with new slime variants. Popovich’s new favorite in Slime Rancher 2 is the Ringtail Slime, loosely based on the ring-tailed cat, a species of raccoon with a striped tail. They’re mischievous, will eat anything, and will continue eating anything. They’re like slime-shaped garbage disposal chutes. Popovich says they also have a secret, but you’ll have to wait until the game launches to find out what it is.
The reason it’s difficult to create new slimes isn’t just because they all need distinct behaviors, however. The developers also need to figure out which distinguishing features will carry across when they’re crossbred with other slime types. With so many different combinations, there’s a lot to take into account.
“It’s a lot of fun to come up with them, to have the artists come up with concepts and choose which ones we want,” Popovich says. “Like with the Ringtail, we had all these different variations. And you’re choosing one that doesn’t quite look like all the rest because there’s one in ten guys who are colorblind in the world, and so we don’t ever rely on color. It’s always shapes or patterns and stuff like that.”
The difficult part is when slimes become Largos through the crossbreeding process since the artists need to make sure their distinguishing traits carry across “cleanly”.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of Largo combinations possible before we even get into some of the new ones,” Popovich says. “We’ve had to build all kinds of new tools that support that particular system. You’re losing real estate every time you come up with a new slime.”
Because of this loss in real estate, as the number of slime variants grows, more and more slime designs are being born of those limitations. “Have we done ears yet?” Popovich says. “Have we done something here? Have we done something that’s pointy? Have we done something that’s purple?”
Thanks to this expanded variety, Slime Rancher 2 will get you into the more complex stuff earlier on. Rather than alienating fans by changing how the game works, the developer sees it as a continuation of the first game. You’ll get access to Slime Science from the offset, allowing you to upgrade your equipment much more quickly, and you’ll also be able to build your teleportation network faster to get around Rainbow Island. According to Popovich, the first Slime Rancher has 12 million players, so the idea was to make sure they’re not forced to start from scratch when the sequel launches. To help achieve this, the starter slimes you encounter in Slime Rancher 2 are a notch up in complexity from the original game’s starting area, and there will be more surprises further down the line.
“It’s not as if, all of a sudden, you’re using a freeze ray and you’re on the Volcano Death Planet,” Popovich laughs. “It’s still the Far, Far Range as you knew it and liked it, but then there’s going to be a point in the adventure where things change up a bit. Once you play through what we have built for the Early Access release, I think it’s going to be pretty obvious to players where that’s going to happen. At that point, you’re getting reacquainted with the game, or you’re playing the game for the first time, and you’ll be ready. If you recall from the first game, the way that some of the gameplay got mixed up a little bit in the later zones, or how the level design changed in those zones, it’s more in line with that, but it’s a pretty substantial change of scenery that we’re really excited about. I think that’s a lot of the way Slime Rancher does things – the new stuff is going to be subtle, and it’s going to come to you naturally. The whole game is about learning by discovery. We didn’t change anything, you still just go where you want to do what you want.”
It sounds like Slime Rancher 2 will be the game Monami Park wanted to create the first time around, minus many of the limitations the developer came across throughout development. When even thinking about making a sequel, the team considered continuing to expand upon the original game. But there was one problem: they’d reached the physical limitations of the world and there was no room to build more. For Slime Rancher 2, they’re getting around that by thinking about that space ahead of time, building more vertically, and planning out for a game that will potentially have millions of players for more than half a decade.
Slime Rancher 2 is Monomi Park’s chance to trim the fat, heat things up, and create its own lean, finely textured beef.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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