User blog:EmeraldPlay/Slime Rancher - Early Developement

I found lately a gold mine of info for the early versions of this game.

It's the devs' blog. Mwahahaha!

Let's get to the point:

Early Premise
Here's a very early premise of the game from November 14th of 2014.

Our first project, Slime Rancher, is a frantic, chaotic and very silly video game for PC, Mac and Linux. Slime Rancher is the tale of Beatrix LeBeau, a plucky, young rancher who sets out for a life on the Far, Far Range where she tries her hand at making a living wrangling slimes. With a can-do attitude, plenty of grit, and her trusty vacpack, Beatrix attempts to stake a claim, amass a fortune, and avoid the continual peril that looms from the rolling, jiggling avalanche of slimes around every corner.

Some backstory: it’s the far future and mega corporations on earth have found a major new source of income in the form of an incredible resource on a very distant planet (a thousand light years away to be exact). The actual name for this planet isn’t important; it’s simply come to be known as ‘the Far, Far Range’ and it is inhabited by scores of strange little creatures: slimes.

Slimes come in all shapes and sizes. They’re cheerful, curious, and have big appetites. And when happy and well-fed they produce plorts. Plorts are concentrated chunks of slime, brimming with the strange energies and unique properties of the slime that produced it. They are prized by earth corporations for producing an enormous variety of goods: everything from indestructible alloys to delicious food products. Humans just can’t seem to get enough slime.

There’s just one problem: slimes only thrive on the Far, Far Range. They need the open air, its sun shining down on them. No slime has ever produced a plort outside of the the Range’s atmosphere.

Enter the slime ranchers- people that sign on to leave earth behind and travel a thousand light years away to make a life on the Range, ranching slimes and collecting plorts to sell to the corporations for lots of cash. Life isn’t easy and the Range offers no shortage of dangers, but the land is good and the air is clean. For some, this is reason enough to leave their old home behind.

So, let’s talk gameplay: it’s a first-person game, and while you could say it’s a ‘shooter’ in some sense, you’re never shooting bullets or aiming down the sights of a gun to kill anything. Beatrix uses a vacpack as her main utility for collecting, corralling, and managing her slimes. It has two primary functions: vac and shoot.

Vac-ing creates a swirling cyclone of air from the vacpack’s nozzle, drawing anything within it to Beatrix. If the objects are small enough, like slimes or resources, they are instantly shrunk down with amazing nano-technology and stored in the vacpack’s ammo slots. The objects collected are even automatically sorted. Handy!

Shooting is the opposite of vac-ing. By holding down the shoot button, Beatrix will shoot a constant stream of whatever slime or object is in the selected ammo slot. Want to shoot dozens of chickens into the sky like a firehose? Well, you can do that with a vacpack. It’s the future, after all.

What’s left? Well, there’s still quite a lot. Beatrix has her own ranch where she keeps the slimes she’s collected. She can grow crops, raise chickens, upgrade her ranch with new features, explore the vast, open country that lies beyond the ranch, and even use plorts to create new, more profitable slimes types… so long as nothing goes awry; because too many slime combinations could result in an explosion of unrelenting, voracious slime monsters that will destroy everything in sight. But more on that later.

Interesting, isn't it? Atleast we know that the 'Far, Far Range' is a nickname for this far-away alien planet, which has no name.

Rancher's Rushdown
After that, they also made what they call: "Rancher's Rushdowns". You can get a insight here:

Pink Slime - January 27th 2015

They've got a nickname, which is "jelly gels".

Rad Slime - February 2nd 2015

Rad dance?

Rock Slime - February 6th 2015

Interestingly, when they were created they ate Fruits instead of Veggies and their favorite was Prickly Pear).

By this, we know which slimes were when developed.

Pink Slimes were first, Rad Slimes were second and Rock Slimes were third. We'll get to that later.

Tabby's Debut!
HAS SCIENCE GONE FAR!?

Here's that widely known image of three Tabby Slimes having fun with a Pink Slime in background.

The image was made on March 11th, which means that they must have been developed atleast for a month.

Tabbies are the fourth slimes to be created.

Pre-Alpha TESTS!
It was April 16th.Devs finally decided to let users test the game.

You could test the game just by logging in the forums, and buying the game on Humble Bundle.

SOMEONE PLEASE UPLOAD THE PROTOTYPE!

Slime Rancher... in motion!
This blog post was made on June 4th.

At this point, GIFs were implemented and functioning in the game.

Here we have few images, like: Phosphor Slimes were the fifth slimes to be created.
 * Camera Bob testing
 * Vacpack sucking things
 * Proto Indigo Quarry
 * Early Pink Rock Largos
 * Early Corrals
 * Phosphor Slimes

Splats working!
Earliest insight on those was made on June 12th.

At this point, they were pretty simple and single imaged. As we know, this later changed.

Reveal Trailer
It was the time to reveal their work!

On June 8th, it was released.

The trailer gives us some insights on:
 * Early Ranch Plots
 * Proto Ranch
 * Proto Indigo Quarry
 * That Dry Reef cell after Feral Canyon
 * A Pre-Alpha sign in the corner?
 * Triple Gardens
 * Honey Slimes
 * Gordos being still not there
 * Feral Slimes
 * Boom Slimes