Reap what you Soul

Reap what you Soul was a much more ambitious game that I worked on, my first product made with a larger group to simulate the industry. It is a Roguelike 2D platformer, where the player explores a new rendition of life after death as a unique duo: The reaper and a mortal soul.

The player is the Reaper and his new companion, their goal being to go through the various layers / levels of the afterlife and collect pieces of this mortal’s emotions and memories. Hack and slash through demonic entities in each level without dying to reach the final boss, gather the last of these pieces, and conclude the story - while exploring this new rendition of the afterlife.

Here are some samples of the script I had a large part in writing, which you can fully view bellow:

—> Reap what you Soul Script <—

  • I mainly contributed to the design implementation of the characters, as well as the larger script being implemented for the dialogue and lore of the game’s world building.

    The story centers around a unique mortal soul, who recently died and had his emotions and memories fragmented from him. It is then that the soul meets The Reaper, who has grown weary of his eternal task and is by no means eager to continue the work required of him.

    To appease the forces of this unique 4 layered underworld, the Reaper decides to help this soul recover its fragments so it can be sent to its proper afterlife. Yet along the way, the two slowly begin to form a bond and a new understanding of one another that leads to strides both in their journey and in their outlook toward the rest of their existences.

  • I have also created a diagram for the player character’s functions during gameplay. These designs were done with rough sketches and photo-editing software, in order to give fellow programmers an understanding of these initial concepts. The use of graph paper minimized design but was necessary to give a visual of distance used on the screen.

    Overall only the necessary features were implemented, excluding a few more I and other designers came up with. This was due to various time and resource constraints.

  • Overall, Reap what you Soul was a very educational experience. It was nowhere near the sort of product any of us had in mind by the end of its production.

    Various narrative and mechanical features could not be added due to constraints from various teams and the producer. And overall, most of us were disappointed.

    This game is still important to me however, because it taught me how to adapt to the needs of the team / product even when I may have my own disagreements. It also taught me that there is no “correct way” to create a game, as each game’s development is very different.

Here is a sample of the combat mechanics I designed.
The grids of the paper used represent the distance for the programmers.

Here is a brief trailer video we made to demonstrate the gameplay, as well as the Design Document I created.

Unfortunately, Reap what you Soul was never released.

—> Design Document <—