Soup for Thought
Soup for Thought was a month long ‘Game Jam’ where I worked in a team of three. I was the only artist creating all of the art assets (except the UI inventory and UI menu). The game jam followed the theme “Plan-B” and was hosted by the Florence Games Festival. I acted as the solo artist, Andrew Wilcockson as the solo programmer and Nayomi Kendall as our designer.
The first few days of the Jam was spent brainstorming the theme, as the first brainstorming session was not fruitful we opted for an emotional game surrounding coming of age/growing up, following the theme of “Plan-B” (Everyone is able to always choose a different path in life and we express this experience through foraging and soup metaphors).
3D Models
The game was set in a forest so I initially started by creating foliage models to populate the level our designer had made, this gave me ample assets to develop as I waited for the soup recipes to be completed.
Although we were going to have over 30 different unique ingredients, I decided not to create 30 unique models for all of them. Instead we created categories of ingredients: mushrooms, herbs and vegetables. I created 2 variations of models for each of these for the player to pick up.
2D Assets
Once a player picked one up they would encounter a pop-up informing them of the mushroom/herb/vegetable, and it was here that I drew sprites for our 30 individual ingredients.
Following our designer’s wireframe I created the journal that the player could utilise for recipes, map, settings and record their soup collection, along with our title key art.
Once all of the ingredients for a soup are collected they cook them in the pot located in the middle of the map and are given a soup ending with an illustrated soup and written emotional ending. From here, further eventuating the Plan-B theme they are given the option to create another soup if so wanted.
Logbook GUI
This game jam was a successful learning opportunity, however, we were unable to have a finished product in the time frame. Nevertheless, our game is is currently in a state that will soon be published.