Introduction

Welcome to our fourth devlog!

We’ve been creating a local couch co-op game where the goal is to cook together. The catch however is that you’re an octopus and every player controls one tentacle. For various cooking tasks you’ll have to work together while the orders keep coming in. We also want to add features where you can lose lives/arms by accidentally cutting your limbs off and annoy each other by stealing items from each other.

This week production has started! That means that from this week on we’ll only be working on things that will be in the game which will start taking shape over the coming weeks. 

Art

The first job for the artists this week was to make our final blockout and use it for the game. This way we can make and replace all the models one by one in the upcoming weeks. The programmers can also start straight away with introducing mechanics to our new kitchen. We’ve also begun working on the final model for the kitchen using the blockout as a handy scale reference.

Then we spent some time making all the icons for the ingredients. For some we have a raw and prepared version. These will be used for various UI elements and to serve as a reference for the artists in the future. To prepare the game to look like these items we have implemented shaders into the build.

Programming

Sticking to much stricter code design (we’re making ramen, not spaghetti!), we began work on the core game mechanics. The controls are ported over from the prototype and feel just as good. Much more of the game is parametrized, as need to keep the features flexible to change once we get to playtesting. For example, the sag of the octopus arm as well as its starting position are now all easily changeable from within the editor.

We laid down the groundwork for a robust grabbing mechanic. This is important given that the grabbable objects will need to interact well with physics, as they are a core part of the game. Objects marked as grabbable must be notified each frame if they are closest to a tentacle (and thus would be highlighted). This ensures that, by the time the next frame comes around, no objects will stay in a glitched highlighted state, which is something we had encountered in the prototyping phase. Once grabbed, the object will follow the tentacle tip via physics forces, rather than snapping to it as a child. This prevents objects from clipping through walls, and should prevent further issues from Unity physics.

There are functional taps to get the different kinds of broths, and we are now working on the design for the recipes system, which is one of the trickier parts to get right code-wise.

The future

The first thing we’ll do is design the recipe system to be able to generate and score dishes based on accuracy and quality of preparation. On the side, we can also continue implementing the various interactions that are required to actually complete a recipe. This entails not only cutting but also cooking, transporting items in containers, and boiling the noodles. We also need to implement some form of fluid system for the broth (which, based on our feasibility research so far, will not be a real simulation).

The artists will keep working on the models for the kitchen, ingredients, tools and other game objects.

Thank you for reading!