In an attempt to create a more interesting slant on the game of Sokoban I considered to change the boxes. I found boxes to be dull and uninteresting. They appear in many Sokoban titles as the original game (as created by Hiroyuki Imabayashi, in 1982) was based on the problem of transporting and organising creates of boxes in a warehouse. In fact the name Sokoban means "Warehouse worker" in Japanese.
So I started looking at a replacement to the box. I found jelly to be an interesting object to use. It is fragile, so you have to be careful on how you move it, you can't easily pull it for example, which is a characteristic to Sokoban game-play. I guess also (although I have not tried it myself), pushing two jellies at a time might work out to be messy. Again that is another characteristic. And I liked the idea of the jelly wobbling about as you pushed it around.
Immediately the idea of using a classically shaped jelly came to mind, as below:
The colours of the jelly set the theme and colour tone to the game overall too.
Of course the X's which mark where the box should go naturally should be plates. The classic English children's song "Jelly on the plate" is a nice link in to that too. So plates it was to be, and fairly easy to create using a 3D software.
Now for the character of the game, the classic warehouse worker needed to be something related to foods, deserts, jelly... As it was serving up jelly onto plates, I thought of a waiter, but to give more visual features to the character, I considered a classic chef's hat would suffice.
So it was, "Jelly Chef" would be the title of this simple (yet slightly obsessive) exercise.
