Slime. It's green, gunky and difficult to work with – both in the physical and digital worlds. But while it may not seem like the most enticing subject for game design, the prospect of having the time to dedicate himself to this very specific cause was enough to tear one tech artist away from working on Fortnite at Epic Games.
Having developed an interest in the physics of fluids, Asher Zhu left Epic to direct Duck Shake Games and start over on his dream of making the most realistic slime movement and slime spawning we've seen in a game a still. Having "always wanted Splatoon mechanics in dungeons", he's using Unreal Engine to create a fluid solver. More than seven months on, he's provided an update on his progress, and the mechanics look wonderful.
The video on Asher's YouTube channel shows a gelatinous ball of slime bubbling, rolling up and down steps, and spawning slime babies that come back to join the mother slime. It seems you can also make the slimey hero shoot out dollops of itself in order to perform double jumps.
As Asher says, the game is in early stages. There's no name and, it appears, no real story at the moment, but a previous video shared in December shows more of the RPG-like fantasy world that our slime might inhabit.
For more on Unreal Engine, see how HaZ Dulull animated Max Beyond, and learn how to use Unreal Engine for compositing. For alternatives, we also have a comparison of Godot Engine vs Unity.
