Postmortem

Successes:

Our art design was well received, playtesters noted that it was engaging and made them want to play the game. 

We also successfully implemented topping quantities, so that they would run out and need to be recooked. This was something on our low priority list, so we’re glad that we got to it.

Challenges:

We changed our initial implementation of using colliders to trigger drink-making functions to instead use buttons. However, since the buttons are on the Canvas, they do not move with the game objects. This meant that every time a new game object was added, the background was edited, or the resolution was changed, the buttons had to be painstakingly repositioned.

Another challenge to do with buttons for object functions is that the player can be on the other side of the screen from the object button the user clicked, but since they no longer had to wait for him to “collide” with the object, the result of the button press was instantaneous. This results in some odd functionality, such as a drink appearing in the player’s hand before he has reached the counter to pick it up. We tried a number of solutions to this problem, but none of them were successful. Although we had more ideas to test, we ultimately ran out of time before the deadline.

What you learned:

We had many time-based challenges in our game, so we spent a lot of time determining which method of keeping time in Unity was best for that given scenario. Randomizing the customers and drinks while allowing them to “leave” and “enter” required lots of coordination between the objects, which taught us to be more organized in our code. We also learned how important it is to comment in the code to explain what each chunk did because a lot of different people were trying to code in the same scripts, and it became confusing. The UI interaction with the rest of the game was also tricky, including setting up the progress bar, transitioning between scenes once all customers were served, and having the buttons we used to start actions stay on the corresponding sprite. Everytime we pushed to Github and then pulled, the resolution changed and moved the buttons, which made playtesting incredibly difficult and frustrating.

Possible revisions:

We could always add more levels, since the basic mechanics are implemented throughout the 5 that we have, it would be easy to pad out the game with more levels in between when a new tea/topping is acquired. We could also add a second plating area as that would introduce more multitasking components to the game. This was part of our original idea, but because we had limited time, we stuck with one plating station.