A former Fortnite tech artist is making the world's most advanced slime monster in Unreal Engine 5
rockpapershotgun.comI know as much about programming video game monsters as I do the exact flavour and consistency of the sands on Mars, but I've always thought the chief advantage of the Slime monster archetype is its economy. A slime, in most games, is a squashy smiley face. Why, I could grow myself one of those right this very instant, by doodling a circle in MS Paint and squinting very hard. Slimes do take more complex forms - chrome slimes, fire slimes, slimes with angry eyebrows, etc - but come now, it's not on the same level as rebooting Lara Croft's hair to billow in the blowback from grenades.
The simplicity of slime creation may soon become a distant memory, however, for Epic Games tech artist and current Duck Shake Games Asher Zhu is hell-bent on reinventing the homely Dragon Quest sludgeball as a technical tour de force on par with his previous contributions to Unreal Engine showcase Matrix Awakens. That's the impression I garner from the below video of Zhu's latest project, anyway, whose description also tantalises with talk of "Splatoon mechanics in dungeons".
As detailed on his Linkedin, Zhu became director of Duck Shake Games - which has two employees at the time of writing - in April 2024, after around five and a half years at Epic, where he was a technical artist working across R&D projects involving Fortnite and the aforesaid Matrix demo.
Fluid physics appears to have been a focus, and that expertise is certainly coming in handy with the slime game, which Zhu began fiddling around with during his time at the Unreal Engine manufacturer (I picture him prodding a drawerful of neon mucus between stints at the Fortnite coalface).
He's recently "restarted [the project] from scratch" with "a new fluid solver that enabled real(?) slime movement and slimeling spawning." Slimeling spawning! You can see it in the video: splash the slime against something and it bursts into multiple, adorable mini-slimes that hasten to rejoin the central mass - like chicks racing back to the
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