Art

Hey!!! The last week was all about polishing already-made assets and I (Laura) improved the Main Menu I made last week! So now when the button is focused it glows up and slides down. Also, I replaced the plate, so it's more clear that the food has to be made. It was replaced with a marble cutting board which you see a glimpse of in the GIF.

 More and More Particles!

Heyo! Vivien here with a bunch of little updates. Aside from Updating most of the sprites and textures (mainly the surface texture, shop border sprites, background sprites, clouds and some buttons) I got to make a bunch of small detail particles. We now have an indicator on when the finished dish was made with burned ingredients. I also added small floating particles in the air as well as some bugs flying around the lanterns!

Heya, Koen here. I made a particle for the bin 

Animations:

I added a few more idle animations. The animations still need polishing (thats for next week) but the whole animation blueprint should now be working fully, and all the needed animations are in there now

RFX

I fixed the eggshels and eggyolk not cooking along with the actual egg ingredient in the eggbreaking RFX

I also integrated the slamming RFX into the slamming animation with a custom event notify blueprint.

Apart from this I also fixed the smoke blending in with other materials in the scene. That's it for me for this week

Programming

Hello reader! Welcome back! Hovo here. This week I had the most important task of all the previous tasks that I've had. We heard a lot that our mechanic is not that fun. People tied that to the fact that it's pretty unique, hence the implementation difficulties. I had to prove them wrong :)

Hold your head high, Sticky Grasper

The most complains were about picking up the food and navigating with it. Call it "just get good bro", "skill issue" or "what a shit game".  Call it whatever you want. We love all our Sticky Graspers (yes that's our player base), so I had to pull off the impossible (*dirty lies*).

Last week, my favourite playtester Elias (Edzra) Van Dyck gave me an interesting idea. What if we added "dead zones" to the food, when it's picked up? Let me show you what I mean:

When the food is picked up, it is more forgiving to move around. You have more room to navigate before the food drops. This is already an improvement, but I cannot rest. The Sticky Graspers depend on me (*more lies*). 

After channeling my inner Tom Tesch, I came up with a genius idea. Now when the chopsticks pick up a food object, the movement works differently. Instead of instantly going to max speed, they accelerate towards the goal.

This felt amazing, and I am sure that this will drastically improve the overall feel of the game. We will have to wait and let the Sticky Graspes decide. We hold them in high regard at Sticky Studios (yes this would be our company name).

Dear Conveyor Belt

I mentioned that we love our fanbase. But that's not all. We also love our in-game objects. So the devs at Sticky Studios decided to give our conveyor belt some breathing room. If there is too much food at the level, the conveyor belt takes a break and stops producing more ingredients. This way we don't overburden our dear game object, and the level stays cleaner. To make the belt produce more ingredients, you have to clean up the level a bit and say please. The second part is muy importante.

Welcome, new Graspers!

My last task was destined to make the "Welcome" message warmer for the new Sticky Graspers. We notices that new players struggeled to understand what they were supposed to do with ingredients. After collaborating with Koen and the grill, we tackled this issue. If the players ignore the grill for longer than expected, the grill will indicate that it needs attention. It looks like this:

That's it for me. Keep it Sticky!

Quality over quantity.

Over this week, I've mostly been working on making the game work as intended.
Even though we intended our game to end after 3 rounds, it ended after 2, which then also made it so it wasn't re-playable if you wanted to start up another game ! This was something that was easily fixable by properly changing the value to what they needed to be at specific moments.

There were also some issues with the bin. With the way the code and level collision had been set up, the food objects would never go below a certain level of height, making it impossible to fall into the confined walls of the smelly box.
After adjusting the collision boxes and code to allow them to fall in, they... fall in ! This gives players an effective way of removing their own food objects to allow the belt to keep spawning more.

In addition to this, you Sticky grabbers can now only pick  up food item at a time, I know, truly a major loss for the speedrunning community, but we had to ! The fact people were able to pick up 2 or more items at a time caused a bunch of overlap glitches as well, making the objects shoot out in random directions!

Nowhere to run.

All Sticky grabbers rejoice! After some feedback from your fellow players and some discussion with the team, we have decided to put a barrier in place to prevent dishes from getting swept up in the conveyor belts tracks and get moved outside of the level boundaries.
This will hopefully also reduce the 'frustration' factor of the game as now you don't have to worry about your hard work of making a dish to be in vain if you accidentally let it fall onto the belt. Be aware though, the dish can still enter the bin and be removed that way, so it's still good practice to avoid dropping the food too close !

Light them up.

Even though the grill lighting up and showing it's awesome particles didn't feel like it gave enough satisfaction to turning it on.
So now when you press the button, it will properly be pressed down, light up and play a sound when you do so for a better feel.

Small but still impressive (and important!)

In my latest round of updates, I tackled various fine-tuning tasks to ensure a seamless and immersive gaming experience. One remarkable achievement was the meticulous adjustment of the conveyor belt speed to synchronize perfectly with the movement of ingredients and dishes. This attention to detail eliminated any unnatural gliding or sluggishness, bringing a heightened sense of realism to the gameplay.

Additionally, I triumphed over a vexing issue with the score display that initially resisted a quick fix. Undeterred, I went back into the code, going back to the spot where l initially fixed it the first time. After re-applying the fix I had done before, the bug has been resolved once more.

In the pursuit of perfection, I also triumphed over a seemingly trivial yet persistent glitch. The thought bubble, an integral visual element in the game, occasionally became stuck during its gentle bobbing motion. My mind located the issue quickly and eradicated the bug, allowing the thought bubble to gracefully bob up and down without ever freezing in place again.

These small but needed fixes and update will ensure the game will be one that people will want to play when it fully releases.
I hope these little fixes don't go unappreciated and unnoticed as they are easy to overlook when they're not there, but easy to bash on when it's noticed by the playerbase.