Art

Grill button and more UI Elements

Hello! Laura here! The past week I was mostly working on UI elements but I did make one asset which is the grill button.

Here’s the grill button:

For the UI elements, one of the things I made are all the numbers for the score:

The other thing is the buttons in all their states that will be used in Menus, I also started working on the Pause Menu. Sadly that doesn’t work as I’d hoped yet. It works fine with the mouse, but the gamepad implementation is not there yet fully.

The buttons:

The somewhat working Pause Menu:

Adding Detail

Heya, Vivien here. We are slowly approaching the finetuning phase, which means this week I started adding smaller details to the scene. I began with adding some assets in the corners of the scene. The basked both looks cute and has some function by blocking foods falling off the sides. Therefore, we also added a small bin next to the customer where players can throw their burned food in. 

Then, I also added a shutter. The shutter will appear before the game starts, opening up when everyone is ready!

Then, I also gave the bell a small effect for when it is pressed

At last but not least i gave our Itch.io page a small visual update! (as you can see)

Programming

Is it over?

Greetings! Hovo here. This week I don't have much to present, since I spent 6 hours just trying to figure out what is wrong with our project. Last week we couldn't package our project, and this was my main focus this week. After reading almost every forum post, and watching a lot of tutorials, I decided to use an algorithm to figure out what went wrong with our project. 

I knew that our Main branch was functional, since I made a build from there a week ago. So somewhere between that point, and the current version of the project (which is over 120 submits), something went wrong. I decided to use Binary Search to find the last version of our project that actually worked. 

After executing the algorithm I found the impostor, namely myself. Long story short, the following solved the problem.

This was (unfortunately) my main focus this week. I spent the rest of my time implementing some utility for the rest of the team. This includes saving the high score data to a file, loading that same data to display on main menu and a function to generate a random order. Those functions will later be used to finilize the game loop. 

That's it from me. Hovo out.

Intrusive thoughts.

Don't worry, we're not talking about my thoughts here, but rather the customers!
The artists had placed a temporary static thought bubble on the HUD to display what it would look like if the customer wanted to eat a specific dish.
This felt really out of place and out of style for me, especially since it was very stylised and unaffected by lighting, it was just a very bright image plastered onto your screen. This also gave rise to the issue of the chopsticks never being able to get in front of the HUD element without any sort of Y-sort. Our game uses the Z-up setting so for depth it would be a Y-sort!
Here is a before and after GIF of how the bubbles look respectively.

The thought bubble has now been properly scaled to fit and not disrupt too many elements of the scene while looking a lot better while being placed in the game itself rather than being a HUD element.
For now it is a static thought bubble that doesn't actually display what the customer wants, that will be the main focus for this week as there seems to have been a slight miscommunication between me and Hovo about the inner workings of the order generation!

I'm seeing stars.. no, numbers!

As per most games, ours will have a score system in place as well. Through a lot of back and forth suggestions we eventually settled on having the ingredients carry their score over to the final dish that it turns into, which in turn will display the customer's satisfaction.
When the customer eats the dish, the score of said dish will be passed on to another actor in the scene who will determine the amount of digits the score contained and will make an appropriate amount of planes and assign the corresponding materials to it.
Once it has been made, it will float up like it does in many games before fading out and disappearing.
Most of the functionality is there! Though the only binds that are tied to this specific subject is the fact that I can't yet bind the actual score to the object. That and changing the alpha value of the material doesn't seem to be as easy as I had anticipated, for now it floats up for one second before disappearing completely. This is not what we want! We want to mask as much of the deletion of things as possible, this also goes for the food on the plate and the ingredients getting deleted at the end of the belt. All small things that can make a game feel rather unpolished.
But I digress, for now as I've mentioned before, the plane floats up and gets deleted with a static value, once the connection with the scores is fixed and I am able to accurately change the alpha value of the material, this will be a nice touch to the game that I think many people will appreciate.

The more we get to finishing the game, the more it feels like I'm not really contributing.
It's around the time where we have to get the core things done and make sure they work well so that the game doesn't feel out of balance in terms of how polished it feels around each mechanic. This week will be mainly focused on getting the customer fully functional: Proper order generation, correct display of thought bubbles, the score getting passed correctly to both the game and the in game score you see floating up and lastly the animations of the customer states. It sounds like a walk in the park, but I think this will the best most difficult week yet as we closing in on the polishing sprint and with that the feature freeze.

That's it for me this week, hopefully next week we will be able to show you a game that is complete and just needs some extra polish  to shine brighter, see you next week!