Gelatinous: Humanity Lost

12/6/2021 Update – Gelatinous OST now available!

While it feels like the CD printing is taking a gazillion years, our pal L-One-X has delivered an early Christmas gift for you! The Gelatinous Original Soundtrack is available right now to stream on Spotify and just about every streaming platform. Backers will have access to a downloadable version; check the next backer update.

Gelatinous on Spotify

Meanwhile, the physical version of the soundtrack is coming along and looking great! The manufacturer sent us a render and–excuse the crummy screenshots, but–we think it looks fantastic. Check it out!

We have a few extra CDs up for grabs, too. You can reserve your copy on our Pledgebox page. (The same place we’re taking pre-orders for the game, winky-face emoji.)

12/2/2021 Digital Wallpapers Update

Good news! We just posted digital wallpapers for those of you who would like to sport Gelatinous greatness on your phone or computer. Get ’em here.

And just a reminder: Preorders are open, but only about 30 copies remain unclaimed. If you want a copy of the Kickstarter Edition, grab it while you can.

Gelatinous Kickstarter Edition preorder

We’ve been quiet, but don’t worry.

The Gelatinous Team has been working away to put all the finishing touches on your game. The password system is up and running, the bosses are awake and bossing it up, the ending cutscenes are well underway! Things are looking great for our projected release date of late December/early January. (But probably more like early January.)

Just today, I finished updating the box art with a few finishing touches. Here it is:

In the final stretch, I can’t believe how exhausting it is to get everything together and send this baby out to the people. But it really is! And it has been so worth it.

If you’re reading this, but haven’t reserved your copy of Gelatinous yet, please know that time really is running out. Especially if you want the Kickstarter Edition with all the swag extras.

Get yours here: https://bit.ly/gelatinous-preorder

Presales are now open!

Sorry for the delay! We’ve been busy getting your game together, making box art, polishing the password system, creating cutscenes and everything that goes with shipping a video game to discerning fans.

While we finish up, there’s still a little time to reserve a copy through our presale partner Pledgebox.

Just use the short link: https://bit.ly/gelatinous-preorder to reserve your game, physical soundtrack CD, or both.

Sadly, if you missed the Kickstarter you can no longer get the Ultimate Edition, but these are Kickstarter Editions that will be no longer available after we ship these out, probably in January.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Kickstarter – Week 1 Update

Gelatinous is now 340% funded! We set out to raise a modest $5,000 in order to print a few copies to sell on Roo’s Shopify store. Now we’re receiving support from all across the retrogaming community. The warm-fuzzy feels are real!

As I type this update, we are just a few hundred dollars away from our 5th stretch goal! In case you’re new or have forgotten, here they are again, ripped straight from the Kickstarter page.


✅ $7,500: Additional Ending – We want you to play Gelatinous again and again. Here’s your motivation!

✅ $10,000: More Passwords – Our password system has a few neat tricks, but we are excited to explore how robust it can be and see what secrets we can unlock for you.

✅ $12,500: Death Counter – Also to encourage replayability and a bit of competition within the community. 

✅ $15,000: 2 More Endings – With the death counter in place, (and with 2 difficulty levels), we’ll provide alternate endings for those of you who can git gud. 😎

🔲 $17,500: Bonus Pin – The pins are pricey to produce in small quantities. But by $17,500 it’ll be safe to say we can afford it.

🔲 $20,000: Color Conversion for GBC – The ultimate goal! We’ll colorize the entire game and optimize for Game Boy Color. We really hope to meet this goal, if only to see our creation come to colorful life!

Are we going to add any more stretch goals? We aren’t sure. We’re sort of running out of ideas, but I also want to give our backers a chance to own the full game and know we added every feature we could think of.

Many are suggesting or requesting that we put out a rom of Gelatinous. For the time being, it ain’t gonna happen. But once we wrap up this campaign, stay in touch.

Remember, we are just raising funds for the physical release. Rom releases don’t require any funds, but we want to make sure our most dedicated fans get something special for fronting us the money that made this physical release thing possible.

Ports and digital editions are currently being discussed, but nothing has been decided except for this: If you back us on Kickstarter, you’ll get a special version of Gelatinous that nobody else will have.

That is all. Thanks!

Launch Day Update

Gelatinous was fully funded within 75 minutes of launch.

I seriously can’t believe it! It took less than an hour and a half to reach our funding goal.

We knew we had some support for this, but could never have expected the amazing turnout we got. Thanks to everyone that pledged or spread the word!

Now that that’s done, we can talk stretch goals!

Please note that almost all of our stretchies are digital rewards, not physical. That’s because distribution is so much easier with digital rewards and we want to make absolutely sure these goals won’t hinder our already-tight delivery projection.

Everything we’ve chosen as a stretch is something we can do ourselves without relying on distributors or manufacturers we aren’t already involved with.

So instead of making you more junk, we’ve chosen goals that will help evolve the game and make it even more fun and unique. Here they are:

$7,500: Additional Ending ✅ (already reached)

$10,000: More Passwords

$12,500: Death Counter

$15,000: 2 More Endings

$17,500: Bonus Pin

$20,000: Color Conversion for GBC

Dev Update 9/10/2021 – Launch Date Announced (And more!)

Have you followed our Kickstarter page yet? Now’s the time because things are moving along FAST now!

Yesterday we were over-frickin-joyed to announce that we’ll be officially launching our Kickstarter campaign on September 16, 2021. That’s like… really soon.

Along with the announcement, we showed off the details of the boxed set and laid out what KS founders will be putting their money toward.

The Kickstarter Edition

The “Kickstarter Edition” shown above will be the standard package that includes the game itself, the manual, box, stickers and a collector’s pin. These are just designs and may still go through some changes before shipping.

The green cartridge is especially cool, in my opinion. And you should know that only the first run of Gelatinous will have it. Future stock will have a standard gray cartridge.

In addition to the boxed game and small swag, we’re also pleased to announce the Gelatinous: Humanity Lost original soundtrack will have a physical release as well!

We haven’t quite settled the debate between cassette or CD, but however we choose to release this, it’ll be exclusive to our backers on Kickstarter.

We’re really proud of the music in this game, as provided by L-One-X, who seems to actually hear the sounds in my head somehow. He’s got an ear for game music and if you check out his Bandcamp page, you can hear more of his excellent work.

More Press

If you’ve searched the web for Gelatinous lately, you’ve probably noticed that this game is popping up all over the place. Pretty nifty.

Hey, it’s us!

Up till this point, pretty much all the press has been based on a release we circulated a little while back, so the info is much the same. But keep an eye out as our official announcement and continued reveals should start popping up, too.

As always, thanks for visiting and stay tuned. Things are happening very fast now. Maybe too fast?! 😬

Keep checking back, fam!

~Steven Long~

Now on Kickstarter!

Gelatinous in the Press

I (Steven Long) had the pleasure of being interviewed by Kyle over at Gamefreaks365. He had some good questions that really shed some light on Gelatinous, how it came to be, and what’s in store.

Go check it out:

Development Update 8/27/2021

The Gelatinous Team is rocking and rolling and actually considering a Kickstarter launch date in September. Which is awful because we really should have decided on a date already.

But with so many great Game Boy titles coming to Kickstarter, we want to do our best to avoid competition, not disrupt the campaigns of other developers, and not force players to choose between pledging to our game or another Game Boy game.

There have been lots of developments since our last update. Our pal Ryan Scotson has whipped up an incredible soundtrack for Gelatinous.

And not only will you be able to hear it in-game, but we’re also working on offering the original soundtrack on cassette or digital for those who really appreciate the chunky tones of the Game Boy!

As promised previously, we finally received a shipment of beautiful 12″X8″ Gelatinous posters, perfect for giveaways or inclusion in some of the Kickstarter packages. I’m not totally sure what we’ll do with these, but they look great!

Since opening up the pre-launch Kickstarter page, we have quickly climbed to 175 followers. These followers are people that wish to be notified when the actual launch begins.

If you haven’t already signed up, please go do it now! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/GelatinousKS

That’s all for now. It seems like we’ve been hacking away at Gelatinous for decades, but it’s really been about 10 months and it’s looking like the entire process, from concept to distribution, will take about one year. That’s not bad for a rookie game development team. But it’s still a long time to be working on a project.

Until we meet again, Goo Crew. Take care.

Development Update (and giveaways!) 8/3/2021

Things are getting more and more real around here lately.

The official story is that Gelatinous is pretty much “finished” and just requires a bit of polishing and a few bug-squashes to bring it to a state that we’d be satisfied to share with the public.

But of course, the real story is that there is a bottomless pile of to-do’s that we could really spend years chopping away at. But really, the prototype is finished and from here it’s just a matter of how polished we can make it before sending it out.

Along with development, I’ve been focusing on getting the marketing train puffing along. Most notably, our pre-launch Kickstarter page is LIVE! Go sign up right now to be notified when we launch. Early birds get a discount, so don’t be shy.

I’ve also been teasing Twitter with the possibility of some giveaways in the very near future. I just ordered a sample run of Gelatinous Posters that could be included in game boxes. I’ve got to see how well they fit before committing to that considerable expense.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to give away a few posters to some lucky fans. We’re planning to do a giveaway for every 100 followers we get on our Kickstarter page. So yeah, go follow that, and follow us on Twitter to be eligible.

Development Update 7/16/2021

After a bit of much-needed breathing room, me and John are back at it. And this time we actually have something to show for our troubles!

Behold the latest version of The Box!

Over the past year or so of working on Gelatinous, it has hardly felt real at all. But seeing my glorious box art rendered in full 3D hit me like a truck. This is totally happening, folks!

At this point, the game is fully developed. Mechanics are in place. Bosses are designed. Kaboom.

However! There are still bugs that need squashing, play that needs testing, sprites that need a few tweaks and the bosses pretty much all need a bit of fine-tuning. A few more cutscenes are going in.

Basically, we feel like we could release the game TODAY and it would be totally playable and even quite enjoyable. But we want to deliver the absolute best possible product for our peeps, so thanks for your patience.

Besides the game itself, we are still working on nailing down the finer points of our upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Running the campaign is pretty much a full job in itself. Add in the design time for all the swag we want to create, the game, manual design, plus our families and jobs… whew!

So thanks for all your support. It will be rewarded soon. Ish.

Development Update 5/3/2021

As Gelatinous nears completion, things are starting to slow down. Building a video game from the ground up is exhausting and the last few months of development have been a great time to look at the whole of our project and start really thinking about the next steps.

We’ve already got the complicated gameplay mechanics in place, levels are built (except one very special one), and the final boss is being playtested and debugged. But we’re nowhere near finished.

Playtesting will take a while, and there are some more bonus features waiting to get rolled out. We turn now to marketing and publishing, which many developers find boring, but to us it just feels gooood.

We are planning a Kickstarter for later this year, hopefully in the summer and certainly not later than the fall. By the time it launches, we will have a playable demo, though we aren’t sure how we will distribute it.

The point of the demo though, is to show that the core of the game will be complete. We’ll actually have a product that could go live and be completely viable on day one of the Kickstarter. But we want more!

The Kickstarter campaign will help us do a few things.

  1. Cover funding in advance for the production of cartridges, boxes, manuals, shipping et al.
  2. Gauge user interest as we continue beyond the Kickstarter and into regular distribution
  3. Help bring to life those little bonuses fans crave: Shirts, stickers, plushies, keychains, and perhaps even an old-school strategy guide.

Stay updated as our saga continues and check back often.

Development Update 3/11/2021

Greetings, Goo Crew! It’s been far too long since our last update. If you want more content from the team, you should follow us on Twitter .

If you’ve been worried about Gelatinous, you can stop now. The game is still very much under development, and still on track to release this year.

We’ve powered through much of the core gameplay development (John did, anyway), and all of the attacks and movements are pretty much set.

The levels are all designed (except for one very special one we’ll talk about another time), and we’re in the process of making some really cool bosses for you to battle! Boss creation has been the slowest and most complicated part of this process yet, as we really want to provide players with something unique.

Concept for one of the bosses

With just a few more major dev milestones left, it’s time to really start focusing on promotion and production. We are still planning a Kickstarter campaign to get Gelatinous funded upfront and offer some nifty rewards for those who want to help us get this project off the ground.

More on the Kickstarter campaign later. More on everything later, really. Just stay tuned for more updates!

Thanks and talk soon!

Development Update 12/18/2020

As 2020 wraps up (finally!), we are happy to say that Gelatinous: Humanity Lost is in a great place. But there’s still a lot to do. Like, a LOT to do! It’s too early to give an official completion date, but we are targeting the first quarter of 2021.

Most major gameplay mechanics are in place, and the first stage is entering the playtesting phase. We’ve got more than half the game mapped out with art, enemies, traps, and treasure. It’s coming along!

The biggest challenge to development has been working around the strict limitations that Game Boy development imposes. We have a ton of big, epic ideas that we simply can’t put into a Game Boy game. But don’t worry; all those ideas are going into a bucket and will certainly find their way into our next game.

In addition to more or less constant game design and development, we are brewing a Kickstarter campaign to try to get more revenue and get physical copies produced, with all the trimmings you’d expect from a brand-new Game Boy game. Stretch goals will include a fold-out map, strategy guide, mini comic, and who knows what else?

And finally, we are putting tons of thought into the in-game extras and bonuses that you’d expect from an official release. We’ve played enough indie games to understand the difference between a good game and a professional game. We want to deliver the best, most polished, most professional product to our fans. So stay tuned and follow us on Twitter to get all the latest Slime News.

Best,

Steven & John

Introducing Gelatinous: Humanity Lost, a brand new experience for your Game Boy.
Coming soonish.

Gelatinous: Humanity Lost is a brand new game for the Nintendo Game Boy slated for release in the first quarter of 2021.

With inspirations ranging from Mega Man and Metroid to Mario and Castlevania, Gelatinous promises innovative action in an original setting. Begin the game powerless and learn to navigate your environment however you can as you explore and unlock new powers.

Published in association with Pop Decades, Gelatinous is a collaboration between Quest Arrest creator John “Retro Room” Roo and Steven Long, owner of GhettoGamer.net.

Screenshots

Gelatinous Facts

Kickstarter Launch Date:
September 16, 2021

Projected Release Date:
Q4, 2021

Developed By:
John Roo and Steven Long

Platform:
Game Boy (Initial Launch)
Additional platforms to follow

Genre:
Retro adventure platforming

Previous Work:
Quest Arrest, Game Boy
Chip’s Challenge, SNES and Genesis

Contact

Steven Long
(Art, Maps, Creative Direction)
Steven@PopDecades.com
twitter.com/longie_long

John Roo
(Lead Developer, Designer, Producer)
JohnRooMusic@gmail.com
Twitter.com/TheRetroRoomRoo