Art

Hi! Vivien here. For me, this week was all about the background. First, I polished the front sprites, giving them sharp edges and polished textures. I also added small note sprites that can be freely scattered around the columns

Everything behind our Dragon Customer is held a lot darker and more subtle to not distract to much from the main stage. To have it blend nicely, we also added some fog cards on the ground and adjusted the light. A nice little detail about these background sprites however is that they are layered sprites. This gives us a parallax effect when moving the camera.

Moving Background Character Sprites!

Hi there! This past week I (Laura) was mostly changing things that were already made and that you've already seen, for example, the flames and splashes, the environment etc. But I won't bore you too much with that, here is the thing I made and put in our scene!

Our background is quite dark but I hope you still can see them. They are our background character sprites! Most of them were designed by Vivien and I just recreated them on a 3D plane, but the fox-like and the dragon-like being are designed by me! 

More effects & Character animation!

Heya. This week I (Koen) made character animations. I made all the poses, as well as an idle pose. This posed quite a few challenges, as the rig that I thought was finished had tons of issues. In the end it worked out though

I also added VFX for smoke trails, a firey burp for the dragon, and possible smoke from the nose

Programming

Hi there! Hovo again. This week started off as being really productive. I set up a system to visually represent the cooking of the ingredients. Based on the cooked time and cooked state, I lerp 3 Parameters that the artists created inside the Base Material for the ingredients. It looks like this:

Then we needed a way to define recipes. My thoughts instantly went towards the Unreal Data Tables. So I set it up. Inside this data table, we now can define each dish and it's ingredients using their names. 

Inside the code, I read this data and save it inside an array. The Recipe Manager is responsible for this. This class has 1 public function that tries to get a dish based on the given ingredients. While this worked perfectly in the initial testing, now it crashes the engine sometimes. We still need to find the reason behind this, so for now the preparing table doesn't use this recipe data table. 

Those were the most "exciting" things I did this week. I spent most of my time fixing bugs to improve the overall experience of the game.

 Well prepared.

This week I mostly spent my time trying to figure things out.
The beginning of the week was very productive, being able to make the customer able to digest complete dishes  when the food falls around the area of his mouth.

Somehow there are still issues with it on other people's devices so I might have to look into that further.

Other than that Hovo and I have been trying to be more efficient with the way we check for our recipes.
Instead of having 50 if checks to know what dish we're supposed to create with the ingredients that are placed onto the plate, Hovo made a datatable where we can get the data needed to know what ingredients corresponds to what dish.
There is still some bugs in the method we call that  makes it unstable at times and not properly create the dish.
I've made a test scenario with the Sushi and it turned out pretty well!

The last thing I managed to get working somewhat was the indication that no available dish had been found.
For this I manually try to move the position of the plate left and right before placing it back on it's original place.
The only issue as of right now is that it checks how many times it's changed direction and then checks the distance between it's current position and it's original one, meaning that if you have a computer that can't run this game well, the plate will just fly off into infinity since by then the distance I've set for it will be way to big. 
Though I do think there is an easy fix so I'll definitely look into that this week.

The heat's getting to me.

The latter half of the week was uneventful and rather frustrating. I tried to make the fire particles under the grill dissapear, pause or stop whenever the grill would be turned off.
However this proved to be a lot more stressing and difficult to do in C++ than I initially had thought, about 2 hours of trial and error just to come up with nothing was very disheartening to say the least.

Same thing with the camera shake, if our customer gets angry and decides to slam the table out of anger, we want our camera to shake for about a second and have the food jump up slightly.
A good amount of time was spent on researching and trying, for now I just displace the camera location for 2 seconds before stopping, although I know the position of the camera is being moved, it doesn't get reflected in the game itself, so honestly I don't know if this method is going to work or not. 

There are a lot of things that are on the brink of being completed and making the game a much more enjoyable experience.
Hopefully by the end of this week, I'll be able to clean up some of the leftover tasks that I wasn't able to finish this sprint, the sooner we can get all the core stuff done, the more we can make our game the best it can be!

See you all next week when we start our second sprint!