Hi everyone! Here’s what I’ve been up too in this 3rd week of development on Souloup.
First Playtest
The first portion of the week was all about polishing, bug fixing and refining some rules and mechanics to make sure it was solid enough for a first playtest. Small things such as highlighting the token the player is currently selecting, fixing collisions and such.
The playtest was short but worked well. I feel more confident that the mechanics are easy to understand and that people (well at least that friend) was interested by the discovery element of the game. The next playtests are going to be chunkier with actual progression.
Recipes
Some thoughts were put into the combinations that lead to recipes. I almost completelly redesigned this portion of the game as I thought it was lacking. The new system has less ingredients and combination posibilities but most components offer MULTIPLE gameplay choices. I find this to be a very important rule in puzzle design. Components used to make the puzzle should be at least 2-sided by which I mean the same object can be used in different situations. For example, an explosive red barrel in an action game can be used to blow up enemies, blow up a hole in a wall for navigation or be used as a platform on which to jump to reach higher places.
The following image was taken BEFORE the re-design, but it is still interesting as it shows a bit of the process.
Mock Up
Finding the perfect resolution is always a bitch. I’m still unsure where Soulsoup will live but I know it would do well on mobile devices as well as on PC or even console. With that in mind, I have about 46 millions different resolutions to work with. That’s just the way it is now. Resolution is critical for game components, layout and size of the assets. For my projects I have 2 sizes I like to work with, like in the images below you can imagine how the very different sizes of the characters affects how everything else is built.
Because of the tilebased controls of Soulsoup, I think the smaller version is more interesting, it has this old-school charm that screams puzzle game and that is why I selected that size.
By the way, if you are interested in seeing how this big boss sprite was made, you can look at the timelapse on my (…very empty) youtube channel 😉 Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQKWqumwycg
After many attempts and redraws, I managed to settle the visual style and sizes for sprites and tiles I’ll be using for Soulsoup. Now that this is decided, it should be much faster to create the various assets I’ll need. I am super excited about starting to make sprites and animate them!
The next images show the progress from an early draft to a potential level. The last image does not show the final product, I’m still working on it, but it shows the kind of details I want to have in the game world such as moving water and clouds. It is still rather empty since the game sprites are not present.
AI
As a final task this week, I got to start the basic AI system of Soulsoup. It is very basic as the critters of the forest have very strict movements and no decision making. It is a puzzle game and reactions to the player’s moves must be predictable! For example, the “deer” runs in the oposite direction of the hero when the hero stands next to it.
I have about 20 personalities like this to code which will then be mixed and matched to create all the various characters of the game.
That’s it! Until the next devlog, have fun!
The Bosstopus 