“It was all working-class, like dive-bar kinda thing.
Which is basically what this place was.”
Back in the day, explains Popovich, the cabinet was the expensive thing.
“The original Slime Rancher cheated.
There was one idea he couldn’t shake.
“And it was also first-person, I’d never done that before.
It was using physics, I’d never done that before.
So it was interesting.”
“So you got a bow that was just a firehose, filling the environment full of melons.
“So I was like ‘oh, a ball-pit simulator would be really fun’.”
For example, Popovich settled on slimes as the subject of the game partly because they require no animation.
“Even when the slimes are wrong, they look right,” he says.
“Slime Rancher was not a great farming game.
“And we have just enough shallow systems that talk to each other in interesting enough ways.”
Another crucial component of Slime Rancher’s design is that those interactions are always externalised.
“We could have had it where when you feed slimes you just get points.
But whenever possible, we try and have it happen in the world,” Popovich expains.
On the subject of plorts, Popovich is keen to straighten something out.
But of course, it reads as poop, because it’s a non-sentient lump of themselves.”
This isn’t the only clarification Popovich wants to make about Slime Rancher either.
But Popovich is keen to stress that the game was never targeted towards children.
Instead, the intent was to make a game that welcomed everyone.
“With our games, we are pro-inclusivity.
“It’s also a smart business decision.
“That’s why the tutorial is like a minute and a half long,” he says.
“You really can vacuum out the magic of a world but putting in a bunch of structure.
That’s one of the reasons why so many Nintendo games are so popular.
You get to play with it first.
We have always tried to do that.
“We have to accept some level of piracy,” he says.
“This is a really strong sign that people want it this bad.”
When the game launched into Steam Early Access, it was an instant hit.
“It exploded immediately,” Popovich says.
And she was baffled.”
In an ideal world, they would have continued supporting it for much longer.
But two things prevented that.
It also gave them the opportunity to let their new team breathe their own talent into the game.
But the game’s colourful presentation belies the heavy physics cost of rendering all those slimes.
“It’s a pastel first-person shooter,” Popovich says.
It was all a conscious decision that there are rainbows in everything.”
Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped people from complaining about performance.
“It’s simulating real-time light, refractions and liquid.
It’s doing all the things that your AAA games are doing.”
But this posed a significant challenge.
“In the case of wings, one of our slimes owns the wings spot.
That doesn’t mean other slimes can’t have wings.
“We have a system that will combine the slimes automatically.
Popovich explains this is a deliberate decision.
“We’re going to slowly start introducing new stuff over time.
You probably can see in game right now where a change will occur.
Crucially, Monomi has the resources to support Slime Rancher 2 for years.
We already courted quite an audience.
