Stretchmancer Devlogs - Introducing the SLIME

04 Sep 2026Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Hey everyone!

Welcome to another Stretchmancer devlog. As the Summer continues baking all of us, we’ve been hard at work on the game. We’ve been designing new levels, polishing up puzzles, and even addressing feedback from all our incredible early playtesters. We figured it was time to peel (stretch?) the curtain back again and dive into another important element of the game - SLIME!

Yes, slime. Not goo, and definitely not ooze. Very important distinction. Now, the Stretchmancer normally has the ability to squash and stretch anything they see. But if it’s covered in slime then it cannot be stretched.

So, we’ve established what slime is. But why is slime? And specifically, why is it all over the place? That’s thanks to one Cisco Slime, real name Cisco Matthews. He’s a diligent and very disgruntled sub-sub-basement supervisor in Sgt. Squish’s massive space complex. He’s got a pretty big stick up his butt about making sure the basement is kept as clean and tidy as possible. What he fails to realize, though, is that it’s that same exact butt that happens to be leaving un-stretchable swathes of slime everywhere he goes.

So the basement is covered in un-stretchable and non-squashable slime, but stretching and squashing are all our Stretchmancer knows! Since the player’s tools are so direct in the game, we wanted to create unique obstacles and obstructions in the game world that force you to think differently about how you use those tools. Since a slime-covered surface can’t be interacted with like normal surfaces, it creates a lot of unique challenges and really makes you stretch outside the box!

Visually, we had a pretty clear idea of what slime should be from the start. We wanted it to be…well, slime. Envisioning a clear sort of neon coating that would envelop objects and surfaces in-game was established pretty much from the beginning.

The real challenge came from figuring out how to implement that vision in-game. It would take a lot of effort to re-model everything in game to have slimed or partially slimed variants, and even just re-texturing things to create those variants would eat up a lot of our time. And if we wanted to get really precise with slime placement or quickly adjust the distribution of slime in certain levels and puzzles, it could be a hassle.

Our solution? The Slime-o-tronic Paintifier Auto-Tool 5000.

Okay sorry I’m being told it isn’t actually called that at all. What it is, though, is a convenient in-engine process that lets us pretty dynamically apply slime to any parts of any objects we want. Every surface of every model in the game is made up of vertexes in the game engine, and we cooked up a handy tool that essentially lets us paint each of those with a special slime material overlay. This makes it really easy for us to adjust how and where we apply slime, letting us design and adjust rooms covered in slime pretty easily!

In the design process, sliming a whole puzzle chamber became a relaxing experience for us. When the world is goo you're left with just a few elements in the room pertinent to the puzzle, and you'd be surprised how devious that puzzle could be!

Now, I need to tell you something else about slime. When you step on it, it sounds very nasty. We worked really hard to make sure that the sound of the Stretchmancers feet slapping against slime-covered surfaces sounded very slimy. Perhaps… too very slimy? You tell us.

Watch on YouTube

You’ll encounter plenty of slime-covered challenges in Cisco Slime’s sub-sub basement, but there’s a chance he might have slithered off and left trails of slime elsewhere in the game, too..

There’s plenty more off-putting obstacles and environmental oddities in Stretchmancer, but hopefully you enjoyed this dive into the ins-and-outs of slime! We’ll see you for the next devlog. And don’t forget to stretch!

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