​Introduction

Welcome to our seventh 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 is the first week of production 2! We’ve made lots of good progress, and are looking forward to the next.

Programming

As part of the challenging implementation of cutting ingredients, we decided to treat sliced pieces as a single object. In testing, we realized it was annoying to have to wrangle each individual piece, so we made it so you can grab and manipulate all the pieces at once, as if it were the root object. This meant some important changes in the codebase, as we now have to make interactions that detect the child pieces also traverse upward in the scene graph in case it was a cut object and all the properties are in fact stored within the parent “piece holder”.

There is also the challenge of cutting too-small pieces that are barely even visible but still count as a chop. We decided to entirely prevent this by pre-calculating the bounds of each part before committing to the actual cut, and failing if one of the two parts would be too small. There are still issues with cooking a sliced object, rendering the outline around its pieces (Unity’s material system is based on submeshes, which makes this tricky), and calculating score based on it, but this is great progress!

As a bonus bugfix, we also made dropping objects much, much better. They will no longer snap up above your tentacle when you let go, which allows for more accurate placing and just… feels normal. Finally, we decided to extend the timer duration after playtesting showed two minutes is definitely not enough time for new players to get acquainted with the mechanics, much less finish one or two dishes.

Art

We’ve almost finished all the kitchen models. Their textures have also been completed, which gives the kitchen a hand painted look. Now only the neon lights and the player guidance “menu” are left to create.

We’ve also finished the dish versions with the ingredients nicely placed in the bowl. Further a soup material with a wobble effect has been added as well. And we’ve started on a fire effect for the stove!

The future

Next week the artists will begin crafting the neon lights and the guidance ”menu”. And they will make the needed effects.

On the programming side, we hope to finish up support for cut ingredients soon, as well as adding a diegetic “instructions menu” (for which the texture is already in progress!) that educates the player on what exact steps are needed for each type of ingredient to get that perfect score. We also aim to put some UI together, which may allow for players to “join” before the start of the game. This way, each player’s tentacle won’t have to just pop in the moment you press a button on your controller.

Finally, we’d like to find a way to reduce the effect of picking up an item causing other objects to fly off into the air and probably fall on some poor customer’s head. You may think this could easily be solved by disabling collision of grabbed objects with grab-able ones, but not so fast: how will the knife be able to cut?

We hope to answer these questions throughout the rest of the sprint! Thank you for reading!