Soda Lord

The Hook

"Soda Lord" is a top down action game, where you play as the Soda Lord, who must protect their soda bottles from being stolen by demons.

One of the main unique mechanics in this game is the fog of war. I was inspired to add the fog of war because of what I imagined it would be like to stop thieves in a real grocery store. In real life, people do not have eyes in the back of their head. People cannot see beyond their peripheral vision. And now, the player would not be able to see behind themselves in-game, either. They would constantly have to be turning around to make sure that everything is ok, like a spy ensuring that nobody is sneaking up on them. Adding the fog of war made my game more similar to real life, and the challenge that came with it made my game a lot more enjoyable to play.

Controls

Use W to go forward, and A and D to turn left or right. Hold space to pick up and move a bottle, and collide with an enemy to make them go away.

Design Challenges

When I started working on the ghosts, I had them spawn, track the location of the nearest soda bottle, and head towards it. This was problematic, because the ghosts had usually spent any time on screen before they found the nearest bottle. This didn’t give the player long enough to react to the ghost’s presence. In the end, I changed this mechanic to have the ghosts choose a random bottle, instead. By making ghosts look for farther bottles, they were on screen for long enough for the player to react to their presence, making the challenge of the game more reasonable.

For a while, the prototype was also problematic because the player did not have that much agency; there were not that many actions that the player could do. To solve this, I added a way to let the player pick up the bottles and move them around the room. This would make the game more strategic, since the player would have to consider when to pursue the ghosts, when to pick up and move bottles, and where those bottles should be moved to.

Future Expansions

I have a lot of ideas for ways that I could expand upon this prototype, to make it into a full-fledged game:

• Give the player a powerup, which they can activate to temporarily light up the whole screen for a second or two, temporarily removing fog of war
• Add a sprinting mechanic
• Add multiple kinds of ghosts with different behaviors
• Add different levels with multiples kinds of terrain and obstacles