Hello again! This week was our final sprint in the concept phase, which means that we now have pretty much everything written down in documents and planned for the production phase.

The Character

First, our character now shines in bright colors and is more expressive than before. During the game you will see him react to the different dishes you prepare with your partner, don’t let him wait to long. If he gets angry, he will slam on the table so that all the foods gets launched into the air.

Asset Example

To get a rough time estimation, we made a little test run for one of our food assets: the sushi. Like already explained, the asset has to match the painterly style of the game. Therefore, we also created hand painted textures for our asset! We are not going to worry about PBR maps like roughness maps, since the asset will be in a flat-shaded environment anyway. All details like material definitions and highlights will be painted into the bae color.

Here is also a quick example on how we are going to tackle each asset: Make a dynamic looking sculpt in ZBrush, retopologies and unwrap it in Maya, bake AO and block out the colors in Substance Painter and paint the textures in Photoshop!

Mock-Up

Finally, Vivien also made another mock-up to see how everything should look like at the end. Here we see the game in action. There customer tells you what he wants, and you and your friend will try to prepare everything before our hungry customer gets impatient.

HUD and UI

Hi there! This week I, Laura, was sketching out what our game’s UI and HUD would look like. It was decided that the HUD would be very simple and wouldn’t clutter the screen. And the UI elements will only be seen in menus. To stick to the street food stall aesthetic I also chose to make our menu buttons - signs that hang from the stall. The Main Menu will also show the player's last score and they’re highscore.

The only HUD that appears in our game is the order bubble and sometimes the score when you have fed the customer. As you can see the HUD is in flat values, the big shapes have a lighter outline and if the HUD goes in front of the customer it has a black outline.

I also tried to draw out how it would look if the button was hovered over, as you can see I decided to make the letters and the sign’s ornaments glow.

RFX 

After finishing up the UI and HUD I started working a bit on our game’s RFX. We had an idea that if food falls, when it hits the ground it has splashes. The result is still in its prototype phase so it looks a bit janky, but it works! This is the result: 

Our RFX will be stylized so I also tested out what the flame for the grill could look like. I think it still has room for improvement so that will be worked on later.

Rigging & Animation

So I (Koen) made a test rig on a test object and gave it a small animation to test out. The rig is fairly simple, with most bones just controlling solid planes, whilst the only bit that actually deforms the mesh is the mouth (and later on in production the tail)

I also tried to figure out more about the jello material, as it would break on meshes other than a sphere. I did not succeed in that unfortunately. More on that next week.

Programming

Since our last devlog post we have decided on what engine we will be using for our game: Unreal
The prototyping in the engines made clear that we were able to do the things we wanted to do in both of them, so for the Game Developers there wasn't actually any preference, so since we wanted to get better and more realistic lighting, our decision was set in stone.

Since Hovo was the one prototyping in Unreal, it was a bit overwhelming to see how different it was from Unity with all sorts of extra properties and data that had to be given if you wanted to make an object.
I was able to follow along with Hovo's prototype code and managed to make a working grill!

When a food object is on the grill without being held by the chopsticks, it will start a cooking timer and based on the value of that timer, the state of the food object will be changed, which in turn changes the material of that food object!

Our idea will be instead of just changing the material colour on the foods, to put a colour on top of the texture and lerp the colours so it smoothly transitions between the states.

Plate

Hovo here. This week I implemented the mysterious plate object. This is where the ingredients get combined into a final dish. 

First I saved every ingredient object on the plate in a TArray. Then I tried to see what types of ingredients are exactly in the array. I tried using different lambda's to do this, but I didn't manage to figure this out. So for now I hardcoded this to finilize the game loop. I will look into the proper implementation of this when we begin production.