The above image is a very alpha version of the cook game-play for the game me and a friend are making called "Project Business Time". In this game players will cooperatively run a restaurant You will be able to choose what part of the restaurant you want to work in and game-play will change based on what job you pick. Jobs will include: Cook, Server, Expo, Manager, Host, etc.
The game will be played with a combination of placing rigid bodies (Buns onto counters, meat into cookers), drag/drop (sauce/condiments onto buns, ingredients on plate), and inventory/menus (mostly for managers managing their stock and such). The character will be a 2-dimensional sprite that changes it's visual orientation when it moves in a direction (hence the arrow in the picture above). The camera will be locked to 90, 180, 270, and 0/360 degrees and will rotate towards the direction you're facing when you press alt.
The game-play developed so far consists of tickets randomly generating an order that must be filled. The only two posibilities so far are "cooked meat" and "uncooked meat". You get the meat out of the refridgerators and you cook the meat in the microwaves. You are also able to pull out the bun treys, pictured near the left of the image, and take them back to the where their are more fridges to use to carry more stock back to your main fridge (Or order your co-worker to do it once multiplayer is up!).
This blog will be used for posting about my minor/major development successes and/or frustrations regarding this project as well as posting demo builds when I have them available.
Current problems I'm working on right now:
- Recipe system allowing players to get something "right enough" that it will be sent to the customer but that they will send it back after an amount of time. The system must be flexible enough to add more recipes as time goes on and their must only be one central recipe system, not one for burgers, one for salad, etc.
- Moving objects around the environment. It works right now, but it still needs to be tuned to make it tollerable for someone who hasn't' debugged it for hours on end. Right now it's easy to not realize the height of the object you're holding and having it run into the counter instead of going on top of it. This will be a fast paced game and I don't want players getting pissed off that they can't do the basic action of taking a bun from somewhere and putting it somewhere easily. One idea is to show lines coming from the object along it's axes when moving it but only display it on the client computer. Another is to only show the horizonal line (for determining height) or a seethrough plane. Also if you press a button, I want it to zoom in closer to "whatever your doing" . "Whatever your doing" would be dependent on what objects you were near/interacting with. Ex: Near a prep counter pressing this button would zoom to the overhead view so you can easily drag ingredients. Whereas if you just walked into a stock room pressing it overviews the stock room, if you open a fridge in the stock room however it would zoom into that fridge when you pressed the button.
- Multiplayer O.o :-/
