Riive

Endless Evolution

A puzzle-platformer born in JamSepticeye 2025, now evolving into our first commercial Steam release with expanded biome design and rebuilt core systems.

Endless Evolution cover art featuring a slime character in a colorful platforming world
game 2026 in-progress Game Design Unity Live Site ↗

Overview

Endless Evolution was our third game jam project. I built it with three friends for JamSepticeye 2025, running from October 1, 2025 at 6:30 PM to October 6, 2025 at 8:00 AM.

Out of 1,158 entries, we placed #33 overall and #18 in visuals. Huge credit to Jess for the art direction and asset quality that carried the game’s identity.

The jam theme was “Death is an opportunity”. We interpreted that as a puzzle loop where failure is part of progress: the player, a slime, absorbs DNA from animal remnants and uses each form’s ability to open new routes through a level.

Gameplay from the original jam build showing slime-based puzzle platforming
Old jam build gameplay: DNA forms and environmental interactions were designed around iterative trial, death, and re-attempts.

Jam Core Loop

The jam version shipped with 10 levels. In each level, the objective is to reach the finish flag while solving obstacle chains with the right DNA form.

The central constraint was simple and intentional: one DNA use per life. The player would take a form, use its ability to change level state, die, respawn, and take another form to continue unlocking the route.

That created a loop of:

  • choose a DNA form
  • use its ability to alter the puzzle state
  • reset through death
  • continue with a new form until the path is solved

DNA Set and Puzzle Design

The jam build had 5 animal forms:

  • Ant slime: pushes heavy objects
  • Fish slime: swims through water while other forms drown
  • Butterfly slime: flies through vertical spaces
  • Bunny slime: high jump and wall jump mobility
  • Goat slime: charge attack to break wooden doors and boxes

Most puzzle rooms combined forms with doors, buttons, and traversal timing. We also spent a lot of our jam time on audiovisual feedback so actions felt readable, even when puzzle states got complex.

Scope Decisions Under Jam Constraints

Because this was our third jam and only four full development days, we chose to build on what we already knew from our previous platformer instead of reinventing core movement from scratch.

That decision gave us room to focus on ability interactions, level pacing, and visual polish while still delivering 10 levels in the deadline window.

The build had bugs, but the core idea landed well and gave us strong validation to continue beyond the jam.

Trailer

Watch the original trailer on YouTube: Endless Evolution Trailer

Post-Jam Development and Rebuild

After the jam, we fixed the most critical issues and reviewed player feedback. The clearest design problem was jump responsiveness: several forms could not jump in ways that felt good moment-to-moment.

In the current commercial branch, every slime can jump, but jump strength is still tuned per form for level design control. This preserved puzzle constraints while making base movement feel much more responsive.

From there, we expanded the game structure into biome-based progression. We are currently near completion of the first biome, Jungle, which will be the focus of the next public demo update.

Current Biome Direction (Jungle)

The newer build includes 6 abilities in this biome:

  • Ant and Fish remain from the jam version
  • Monkey can climb walls and swing on ropes
  • Frog can high jump and use its tongue to hit targets
  • Hummingbird can slow perceived world time
  • Chameleon can camouflage to avoid enemy detection

We also introduced enemy pressure and hazard layering, including melee and ranged monkey enemies, mosquitoes, spike setups, and carnivorous plant traps.

Systems Rewrite

We rebuilt large parts of the codebase to support long-term development:

  • reworked ability architecture so one shared input triggers form-specific behavior through interface-based methods
  • each form now owns its own ability implementation (including the default slime)
  • improved menu usability with keyboard traversal support
  • replaced the save pipeline with a version-tolerant system designed to keep older save files compatible
  • expanded interaction verbs with levers in addition to buttons

Try the Demo

The current Steam page hosts our existing demo, and the upcoming Jungle demo update will reflect the new biome direction and systems work.

You can play it here: Endless Evolution on Steam

I will keep updating this page as development progresses toward full release.