Cannibal Slugmage of Eden is an old Ludum Dare entry that I never finished.

The theme was evolution. You play as a cannibal slugmage, trying to breed a naturally-evolving population of slugs to better fuel your magic and eventually allow you to remake the world in your own image. The competition version was nowhere near as cool as it sounds, but I hope to turn Slugmage into the game it was meant to be!

Build Instructions

There is currently only a build script for SBCL. I hope to write a more portable script soon.

1. Make sure you have quicklisp. (lispbuilder-sdl is also required, but quicklisp does a pretty good job of installing it and its dependencies.)
2. If you're on Windows, make sure you have zlib1.dll and SDL.dll either somewhere accessible or in the build directory. You can find them at http://libsdl.org and http://zlib.net.
3. Run sbcl --load make.lisp. If you want, you can also specify an alternate name for the output (the default is slugmage.exe, because I started the project on windows): sbcl --load make.lisp slugmage.

And now you should be able to run it! (If you move the executable, make sure the images are in the same directory, and on windows that you also have the various runtime dependencies (SDL.dll and zlib1.dll) accessible or in that directory.)

Gameplay Instructions

The movement controls are somewhat nonintuitive right now and not yet rebindable: they are a (qwerty-based) grid consisting of qweasdzxc. s (in the middle) is the wait key; the others move in the corresponding direction (so q is up-left, d is right, etc).

You can pick up slugs by walking next to them and pressing g, then the appropriate direction. Slugs you pick up will appear in your inventory. You can also press t and click a slug to drop it.

Alternately, once you have some slugs in your inventory, you can press m to do magic. Here, you can click on slugs in your inventory to eat them, adding their Mana score to your transitory total. When you have enough mana to cast a spell (check their costs by mousing over them; they're the colored squares on the UI bar), you can click the spell box and then finally click on a target in the world to cast it. Note that mana works a bit like it does in Magic: The Gathering: all mana left over at the end of your turn is lost.

As for what the spells do: Lightning and Fire are currently the same (Fire used to kill an entire stack of slugs, and still will if there is ever a stack, but slugs shouldn't be able to colocate anymore). Hand allows you to grab a target slug from arbitrarily far away, and Dawn displays the victory message. (I would like Dawn to eventually have a pretty animation, but currently there's nothing at all.)

For basic information about controls, press ? ingame.