Devlog 01: The Beginning

Introduction

Hi there and welcome to our game project for Howest DAE! We’re a team of 6, consisting of 2 programmers, 3 artists and 1 sound designer.  We'll create a “vertical slice” of a game in two weeks spanned over 3 months, going through the complete production pipeline from concept to final product for the very first time! 

The team:

• Lennert Saerens (Programmer)
• Gilles Durnez (Programmer)
• Ines Bouwen (Artist)
• Fien Buyse (Artist)
• Oskars Mirlina (Artist)
• Charlie Vervaecke (Sound Designer)

The beginning

This week was exciting for all of us. It mainly consisted of getting to know each other and brainstorming to get our game ideas straight. Some good, some bad, but one stood out...

We are proud to present Soup Showdown! A game where 2 teams compete to make the best soup, all while playing a game of tennis. While ingredients fall from the sky, you must make sure to hit good ingredients into your pot, and bad ingredients into your opponent's pot. Some ingredients are special—ghost peppers, squid ink, ice cubes, pufferfish… These ingredients are still in the brainstorming phase, because our first focus is to answer some core questions about the game.

Art

We know that we want the game to be stylized, but the details are vague. Moving forward in prototyping we will compare many styles and prototype them in Unity and Unreal Engine. Hand painting would be too time-intensive, so we are strongly considering some shaders that can achieve a similar effect.

Programming

We are primarily focused on prototyping the core mechanics in both engines. There was some concern that introducing special ingredients too early could overcomplicate development. To avoid this, we are first ensuring that the main mechanic works and is fun on its own. Since we haven't settled on an engine yet, we’ll be testing which one best suit our game.

Sound

Our trusty sound designer has been messing around with sound implementation in both engines while cooking up some music to really give players that rushing feel as the timer runs out. He’s also figuring out what sound effects we’ll need and making sure we’re all on the same page about the game’s overall sound direction.

That’s all folks! Thank you so much for reading and we hope you’re as excited as we are!

~ The Soup Showdown Team