Hey all! For my first game project of the year I chose to revive an old game idea started 5 years ago. It’s called Soulsoup. A game about souls…and soups! It’s a puzzle matching adventure that I feel is a simple enough project to finish in the 12 weeks deadline.
What is Soulsoup?
In soulsoup you play as a treasure hunter, more like a thief, that steals an artefact from a mysterious temple in the woods. The artefact is a magic cauldron that comes to life when you attempt to take it away.
You are effectively made prisoner of the woods, stuck there to serve as the cook to an insatiable creature with a peculiar diet called the glutton.
The cauldron’s magic allows you to summon and bind souls into different delicacies that you feed to the glutton.
The game mechanics are quite simple, you have to mix ingredients together to create the dish the glutton requires. The twist is that the glutton and the hero are in the level as well. The glutton eats anything in proximity. The hero must not be eaten while he moves around to do various actions such as harvesting, digging, collecting and moving objects the cauldron can’t. It’s a game about discovery, memory and planning.
I want to build 2 modes: the adventure mode which takes you to pre-populated levels where you have to find how to create the correct dish in the least move as possible and an infinite scoring mode where you have to be quick to make dishes and points before the Glutton decides to eat you.
1 week in
This week I spent most of my time going through the old code and cleaning it up… It’s really awful code haha. Seriously I don’t know how it worked. Thank god for those comments though! If there is one thing that I’m glad about is that I always comment my code even if I’m the only one working with it. In this case it saved me a lot of hassle in understanding how that old code worked.
It’s amazing the things I learned in the last 5 years. For example, I remember that one system that took me nearly 2 weeks to understand and develop took me 45 minutes to reimplement in a much better way. I don’t qualify as a programmer and I don’t have a lot of opportunity at work to develop that skill, but this shows that with practice and dedication it is possible to learn almost anything.
The first thing that I made work is the level design tool. It’s a handy in-game tool that allows me to create levels, play them, save them, export them to a script that can be used to rebuild them in the real game. It allows me to design and test puzzles much faster than actually scripting each level and compiling the game each time.
I am focusing on the score mode at the moment which doesn’t require any level design but relies on all the core features. That way I am making sure everything works properly before attempting to design puzzles.
This week’s clean up payed up and I played a game in score mode for the first time in 5 years. I need to get some rules sorted out to make it more fun but the foundation is there.
Next week is about integrating these design changes to the core rules and mechanics. Maybe I’ll fit in some pixel art too. I’m getting annoyed by these placeholder souls!
Until next time, have fun!
The Bosstopus 