High Level Overview

Genre: Fantasy-themed runner game with action elements

Art Style: Side-scrolling 2D in “Dead Cells” art style

Audience: Everyone

Platforms: Any

Gameplay Overview

Game in Brief

Jelly Smash is an action runner game with action elements as part of the Jellyverse – an entire universe of minigames revolving around fantasy world slimes.

In this game, players choose to drop into a level with a limited number of Jelly characters of different types, sizes and abilities. Once dropped into procedurally generated levels, the characters will slide and tumble down a slope using fluid dynamics and try making their way down. As they slide, get caught by obstacles, or get damaged by enemies, they’ll melt away and decrease in size. The goal is to have as many jellies as possible reach the bottom of the slope safely.

Each slope will have obstacles in the form of enemy structures, units and champions which, upon their defeat, they can be “assimilated” and used to spawn additional jellies or buffs from. The end of each slope will present players with, one of many events. These level ending events can range from boss battles to castle sieges or anything whacky that we might think it’s thematically appropriate for that level category.

The Jellies

Jellies will have various properties and sizes based on the type of enemies that were defeated in a level and what jellies managed to survive at the end of it. The pool of jellies players can earn will be a procedurally generated one with 2 types of seeds:

• Developer enforced – are standard, basic jellies gained from normal enemy units, called Commoners
• Strict random generation – are advanced jellies with various properties gained from champions, called Lords, Knights and Kings based on their size, which in turn determines the number of properties they have.

The Drop

When starting a level, players can partially customize a procedurally generated level by choosing the main level elements (game type, level length, enemy strength). Players will see a dynamic difficulty indicator for their choices in the form of an animated character and a counter for how many jellies of each type and size they’re allowed to drop in the level.

The Slide

During the level, players will have limited control over what the jellies do in the form of queued contextual actions. The jellies will slide and tumble on their own and perform the actions as their AI deems appropriate. Players can make the jellies jump, slide, fuse together to increase size, split into smaller ones and attack a specific target.

Enemies of different sizes and types will be procedurally generated and sprinkled on the level to prevent the player’s jellies from reaching the bottom of the slope.

Different environmental effects like seasons and day/night cycles will also affect the slide down by affecting both jelly behavior and enemy type generation.