Ryan's Dev Blog

Date: January 14th, 2024

This week was mostly spent getting everyone up to speed on the GitHub and ironing out the final vision for the game loop. We also recorded the LARP. Pretty much no dev work this week.

Date: January 21st, 2024

This week I worked on adding the basic customer behavior. This includes spawning the customers, generating their appearance, and tracking their patience. This was a pretty easy feature to implement, and a great way to get acquainted with the game's source code.

Date: January 28th, 2024

This week I created the order system for customers. This includes the rules for generating orders and allowing customers to create orders. In the future, we'll want to base the Prep Station off of the structure of these orders.

Date: February 5th, 2024

This week I created the bones for the Prep Station. This includes a system for building orders in the same structure as customer orders, as well as allowing you to give an order to a customer with a matching order. There's no ties to a rhythm system yet, so that will be something for next week.

Date: February 12th, 2024

This week I worked on unifying all stations through an abstract station class. This allows them to share certain properties, like the ability to tie a camera to each station. I also worked on adding a particle system for the pancakes as a proof of concept.

Date: February 19th, 2024

This week I fully implemented the particle pancakes into the pancake station, as well as helped with adding a proper flip animation to the pancake. I also assisted with adding hi-hat and pitch-shift triggers to the station based on your proximity to the pancake cursor.

Date: February 26th, 2024

This week I worked on reworking the dish station to use the shape coordinate system, similar to how the pancake station works. Now, four stains will be randomly placed on each dish, and you have to move your cursor to the right stain on the right beat. This gives the stations a lot more similarities that can be optimized later.

Date: March 4th, 2024

This week I expanded the abstract station class to have more functionality for shape-drawing, playing audio feedback, and accessing song info (BPM). This will make it a lot easier to implement song-swapping and difficult options.

Date: March 11th, 2024

This week I took the expanded abstract station class and made it serializable. Now, we can quickly create new levels with modified settings via JSON files. Additionally, I added a basic Prep Station, where you must trace randomized lines with the correct toppings. This Prep Station still needs to be hooked up to the customer orders to be fully functional, but works as a nice proof-of-concept.

Date: March 18th, 2024

This week I finished hooking up the Prep Station to the customer orders, allowing players to draw lines based on the orders generated by customers. There are also some improvements to the general UI and feedback.

Date: March 20th, 2024

This week was a massive crunch. I worked on adding tutorial prompts to stations, station swapping UI, reservoir UI, an end-of-day screen, various UI polish, and tons of bugfixes.