Art Update

Interior and Appliances

One of our main feedbacks was issues revolving around communication, clarity, and overall asset improvement, so we’ve updated and created new models to help improve these aspects.

• Icing and chocolate station models have been made to make it easier to delineate where players can get different ingredients (instead of having fridges with names of ingredients)

• Models for both the walls, floors, and register have been made to improve the visual look of the scene

• An update was made to the cutting board station and fridge to make it easier to understand what the assets are used for

Character Design

Protagonists are animated and two NPCs (Caldero and Shannon) are textured using hand-painted vertex painting and rigged for animation. Joy and Moody’s face textures have also been fixed. Currently adding Hug and Panic (on fire) animations.

UI

Currently working on updated/polishing UI. Created the 6 expressions for Moody and Joy. Created simple pop up icons for dropped objects to have better communication to players. 

Gameplay Update

Controls

After overwhelming playtest feedback we switched our controls to toggle. Additionally, we made prompts when users get near appliances they can interact with. We are hoping this helps with onboarding.

• These prompts went through multiple stages. First it was four black dots but players found this confusing.
• We landed on the specific control (in our case switch buttons) appearing above the appliance. This has its own issues with visual clutter, but is a good starting point to build off of.

Environment

We added crabs which slowly move around the beach. This was a pretty easy change since our play area is already a navmesh. Thanks ChatGPT!

Fire

We modified our particle effects to (ideally) reduce performance. We also made more internal changes to how the fire extinguisher works (including adding a second).

Repair Microgame

We’ve changed the microgame for repairing appliances from the standard sliding bar game to a button masher that scales with the player’s stress. The game cannot be failed as we saw frustration from playtesters that they may fail to repair appliances and cause further fires.

Improvements to Lighting

The lighting system has been adjusted to only shine spotlights over the particular appliances (namely fridges) that are involved in fulfilling current customer orders. For example, an order for bread, which only requires dough, will only spotlight the dough fridge.

Audio Update

• Music:
  • Finished writing B side
  • Recorded vocals for B side
  • Finished A->B transitions
  • Wrote B->A transitions
  • Programmed all transitions in FMOD
  • Added pause filter for the music
    • Lowers volume, adds low pass filter, and mutes all channels except the drums and bass for a chill “elevator music” vibe while the game waits for the player to unpause
  • Mixed and mastered both sides
  • Imported adaptive music to unity
• Sfx/Ambience:
  • (most) sfx and ambiences get muted or filtered when paused
  • Created ambiences for kitchen and beach environments
  • Created footstep sfx with variations for tile, wood, sand, and water
  • Created sfx for initiating and winning qte
    • Began implementing qte event
  • Began implementing footstep system for players and customers