Baked Devlog #1

Art Update

The art team spent this week working on modeling assets and taking characters from 2D designs to simple 3D models.

Environment Assets:

A simple scene setup of the game setting with simple colors and texture to visualize the mood.

Character Design:

A simplified version of Moody (Player 2) was designed in Blender with some simple colours and imported into Unity as a placeholder for the final textured and animated character.

TJ’s basic form has also been started in Blender.

Appliances Assets:

For the game jam, basic appliances were made in order to figure out the layout of the game. Now with the feedback from the pitches as well as fleshing out the theme/mood of our game, concepts for appliances that will fit the theme are being made.

Food Assets:

After deciding upon a beach setting for Baked during the first meeting, we wrote a few recipes/dishes that can be made in the game as the ‘menu’ customers can order. This document includes ingredients as well as the order of steps to create the dish. Further research and discussion needs to be made before deciding upon the final food items. 

UI Assets:

Started to create the simple QTE bar inspired by the attacking mechanic in Undertale and sketched potential covers as the homepage of the game during game jam. 

Music Update

One looping song made at the game jam

Updated with a cleaner mix, and added an intro before the loop region

Placeholder sfx created for fire burning loop, cash register ding, and oven operating

Created list of assets to be made (music, ambience, sfx)

Began assigning assets to each musician

Gameplay Update

This week after the game jam we made a lot of gameplay progress. So much that we will break it into sections.

Code Changes:

We refactored large parts of the codebase post-game jam. Some of the more significant refactors include making generic timer classes to re-use throughout the code, changing character movement to use the Unity physics engine, and consolidating parts of our control-scheme code. 

Fire:

Before the pitch, we were still having trouble deciding on some core gameplay. This meant that development was mainly given to mechanics that were (almost definitely) going to be included into the game.

The first of these mechanics is the fire system. After the game jam we had a prototype working, but the visuals were bad even for an alpha. We re-did the particle systems to make them nicer. He also modified the state-machine present in flammable objects in order to make them heat up and turn more red before they are set on fire. This way the player has more visual cues for when something is about to burst with flames!

Additionally, we added a new type of flammable object… people! When the player is set on fire, the effect is mostly visual, but turning it into a gameplay mechanic (hopefully) will not be difficult.

Below are some screenshots of these new changes:

To the top left is the player and the fridge on fire, heating up some conveniently flammable cubes. To the top right is the new smoke effect which pops when an object is first set on fire.

Appliances:

Of course, to properly work in a kitchen we need functional appliances. After the meeting, we decided that in Baked, instead of holding down a button to use an appliance (e.g. Overcooked), the player will have to play microgames. Ideally, we can have unique microgames for each appliance, but for now, we are doing a simple QTE inspired by the attacking mechanic in Undertale.

Right now, the difficulty of them is random, but once we implement stress, the difficulty will scale with stress. When the player fails, the appliance gets set on fire. When they succeed, it doesn’t get set on fire. (Food outcomes will be programmed in future). We are hoping that by adding these microgames along with the stress system and our unique fire system, our game will differentiate itself from overcooked in gameplay.

Queueing and Customers:

Towards the end of the game jam we began to experiment with the spawning of customer NPCs but the functionality was very limited and flawed due to the inability to program character AI within the time constraints and ambiguous ideas on how the customer characters would behave. Following the game jam we built on this code to include the spawning of NPCs at random times and had them queue behind one another like people in a line. Our customer queue consistently updates so that when customers are able to be served later on in development, the queue will continue to keep moving. Currently, the customer characters are placeholder shapes so as we continue to expand on this functionality we’d like to add randomized models for customers.