Souper delivery - Game jam project

I am happy to show off "souper delivery" which is a game made during a game jam organized by Breda University of Applied sciences. The theme of the game jam was "Drift", and with a team of 7 people, we delivered this little gem.

Souper delivery is a retro arcade racing game, inspired by crazy taxi and SSX. Play as a delivery driver, rushing to bring your customers their soup order in the middle of the frozen mountains! Reach their house quickly, before the soup freezes, and grab some extra ingredients on the way to increase your score!

Trailer for SOUPER DELIVER

The mechanics

The game loop is quite simple, players need to reach the end of the level as quickly as possible, while also collecting ingredients as they go by. Achieving a good score is done by striking a balance between finishing the level quickly, and gathering a good amount of ingredients. Picking up an ingredient also grants players a single-use boost, they can activate by pressing X. Some ingredients have a multiplier, depending on if its your customer's favorite ingredient, which makes some paths more optimal than others as players might prioritize a certain type of ingredient.

The level design

The level design was heavily inspired by SSX, which is a cult classic in this genre. This is a game I personally grew up playing, and have always been fascinated by its level design. SSX is a snowboarding game, with levels featuring many intertwining paths, shortcuts, secrets and all sorts of crazy ramps.

SSX tricky gameplay

My goal was to create a level which would also feature the same complex intertwining paths and crazy ramps. Creating so many different paths that all lead into one-another creates an interesting track that the players will be able to play over and over, while always experimenting with a new path to see which one is the fastest for them. This introduced replayability and player agency, both in a relatively short level (about 30 seconds long). I spent a long time to balance the level, making each path viable, while some still have some advantages over others depending on your customer's favorite ingredient.

Sketch of the level I made

The level was designed following a simple structure, with a beginning section, which also gave players enough space to be onboarded on all the mechanics, a middle section, that would expand on the basic mechanics, introducing diverging paths, and a final section, which added a third dimension to the level design by playing a lot with elevation and crazy ramps. This increasing difficulty is also mirrored by the environment, which starts out as a simple forest, slowly transitioning to a city, where man made structure are used as ramps, obstacles and branching paths, which all add complexity.

Conclusion

I am really proud of the final game we have managed to put together, working on this alongside 6 other talented designers has been a pleasure. Everything in this game, from the art, the music, to the gameplay and the levels was homemade with love! This project taught me how to work fast, especially in the context of a game jam, what to prioritize, and what corners cannot be cut.

My design process was simply to play around with the character in a gym, and find out what is really fun about it, and how to lean into that as much as possible through the level design.

Using SSX as a reference also helped a ton, I was able to find resources online of SSX levels I could analyze and take inspiration from (like below!).

SSX Tricky Mesablanca track - with highlighted paths

This was such a fun game to design levels for, even though balancing them was so much more complex than I initially thought (I had to cut the third section, see initial sketch), but I wanted to prioritize quality over quantity, even if my level was only 30-40 seconds long, I felt it made up for it with how much replayability it had, players wanted to keep playing it over and over again to experience all the possible path combinations and shortcuts!