Pushing Forward.

New teammates have been added, we made it past the project cuts, and it's time to move forward! Focus must now be shifted to polishing up our current mechanics, testing and implimenting new systems, and making sure the game is as fun and functional as possible.

Add Some Meat To That Sandwich.

○ New Art

A bigger team meant more work could be done at once. Allowing our project scope to expand along with the longer time constraints. Now that we had two more artists one specializing in props allowed for props and sandwich ingredients to be quickly modeled, textured and then passed off to be implimented into a new build of the game. While this new dynamic artist trio sped up the art creation process it also needed to be managed, Riley Morrissey our original main artist now carrying the title of Lead Artist deligated and organized work to the new team members in her speciality.

○ More / Better Systems

While the artists dilligently work populating the game with more and more props and ingredients Karl Lewis (the second designer on the project) and I cooperatively created design documentation to flesh out more of the systems that are currently in the game loop, along with new mechanics.

A New Level.

At this point in the project the current level began looking outdated with the old prototype artwork, the temporary setup needed to be reworked for the new mechanics and four player gamplay. As the level designer in the team I took on the project of remaking the main level and blocking out future variations. Not only did the main play space have to be updated to accomodate up to four players at once, but the surrounding background needed to be updated to maintain a constant theme for level while also providing players with hidden items / something else to look at while waiting for the game to start.

This new level also connects more with our core demographic as the minimal edge-work and bright colors makes the players pop to stand out form the environment.

More Player Feedback and UI.

At the time the current gameloop was lacking in player feedback, when QA'ing the game players voiced their concern about not understanding which slice of bread they were controlling among the caos. Using the feedback as a main starting point we redesigned the user interface (UI) to revolve around each player being represented with a primary color. The UI was also updated to display every ingredient that players currently had in their sandwich represented by cute simplistic 2D art. Players expressed much more interest in competing with one another after the UI updates as it was easier to understand who and where you were in the level. Karl and I began designing a new customization system in which players would be able to unlock and customize different toothpicks before the start of each game. Toothpicks ranged from plastic sandwich swords, to drink umbrellas.

A new timer was also added which slowly floats at the top of the screen counting down to the end of each round. This timer is also attached to objects within the scene such as rotating the dial on the kitchen egg timer sitting on the table adding more life to the level.

Moving Forward:

Looking forward I am glad my team decided to choose this game over our other prototypes, so far this experience has been extremely rewarding as we complete and impliment more and more features into the build. This production experience has also been scoped in such a way that I have not been extremely stressed over deadlines. Everyone on the team knows what they are doing and deligates tasks accordingly, our production pipeline through scrum has done wonders for us meeting our deadlines.