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[ThilDuncan]

@oldblood - Glad to be back, we've been putting in a lot of hours and it's really starting to take shape. We'll have lots more to share over the next few weeks : )

@FlukeXP - Thanks a lot, appreciate the kind words! : )

[Mya]

Looking super cool. I like the hat wobble/bounciness - more of that please

Who are your biggest culinary influences? And when do I get to play this?

[ThilDuncan]

@Mya - Thanks Mya. My biggest culinary influence at the moment is the legendary UK chef Tom Kerridge. But I'm super fickle and can change my mind at the drop of a baked potato. Could really eat a baked potato now actually, mmmm...

We're hoping to show the game again at Play Blackpool in May but who knows we might get to hit up some of the conventions in Mainland Europe eventually!

(ps. Conveyors belts are now in the game and are amazing! Will share some shots/gifs of those next week :-) )

[ThilDuncan]

Another busy week this week.

We met up with some of the students from Anglia Ruskin University who helped us test our very experimental 8 player mode (8 players sharing 4 pads) in one word: chaos. Not helped by the fact that Unity's input system couldn't cope with 8 players all trying to press their triggers at the same time! But it was still a lot of fun

here's a shaky video which captures a little bit of the madness:

We've also been experimenting with new locations in the game too, each of which comes with a whole host of new gameplay mechanics. Here's a little sneak peak at some of those:

[Fire and Ice and all things nice]

[Slidy slidy]

(The hope with the sliding/boat level if that we can use the rocking of the boat to rearrange the level at key moments so the player's will need to rethink their strategies for a level on the fly. Can't wait to build a level and see how people react : )

We're taking a new build with us to Play Blackpool this Saturday. We're going to be road testing our new conveyor belt test levels as well as a competitive multiplayer level (2 vs 2 in two adjacent kitchens!) Also since we've now addressed the controller input bug we'll hopefully get to do another test of the 8 player level (providing we can find 8 willing participants)

What else? Erm... we've been eating a lot of biscuits. Mainly these and these

We'll have more for you soon, just wanted to give you all an update on our progress!

P.

[ThilDuncan]

Oh and as promised here's a little peek at the conveyor belt in action.

Amazing how much of a difference it makes to gameplay when objects are in constant motion!

[ThilDuncan]

Lots of new things went in this week.

Oli has had his nose to the grind stone introducing rats into our kitchens. We have a series of different mechanics like this which aim to disrupt the player just when things seem to be going their way!
Here they are in all their debug/timelapse glory:

We also hit upon the idea of a horror-themed level which is almost completely pitch black and players would need to memorise the location of their various cooking tools (as an added bonus this leads to lots more communication outside of the game when players struggle to keep track of where they left their pots and pans :D)

What else... We have a fully functioning boat level which is working really nicely. The major benefit here is that we can disrupt the level just when players have figured out their strategy, meaning they have to quickly scrabble to rethink their approach.

Using lots of camera trickery we also created a level inside a moving food truck. Still working on the look of that one, but it's a great excuse to create a really pokey level where everyone is falling over themselves, and I got to model a scooby doo style repeating landscape which is always fun!

Hoping to get as many of the main features in this month so we can start working tying it all together with a save/progress system after that! Anyway hope you like what you're seeing so far. Would love to hear any suggestions, feedback, questions etc. from you good folks on the forum!

- Phil

[ephoete]

A level without gravity could be also fun! 

[slarti88]

Whoa...

Reading through the devlog the feature set just kept escalating and now it looks like a really diverse game. Would love to play this when it gets out! Love the night level idea, it'll make the co-op really interesting

[ThilDuncan]

@ephoete - Excellent :D We already have our eyes on a space-themed level. Some kind of modular space station so we can have fun with airlocks and moving sections etc. I wonder how Zero G would work in our game... I guess you'd keep travelling in a straight line until you hit a wall/counter which you could launch off : )

@slarti88 - Thanks! We've been working really hard to get new features in the game. Really want to keep players on their toes and experience lots of cool new features as they progress. Unity has been really great at allowing us experiment with gameplay without having to spend weeks on each new feature too.

For example, yesterday we were playing around putting level assets into an empty game object and then animating it to give us this:

[Ishi]

That's amazing. Amazing way to suddenly throw a twist into a level that the player's won't expect!

[TankDuck]

YES. Amazing! You guys are a powerhouse

(its me btw)

[ThilDuncan]

@Ishi - Thanks, it's been really throwing people off in the tests we've done : )

@TankDuck -Good to hear from you! Glad you like the game. Looking forward to hearing more about Tank Duck!

This week I've been finally getting round to modelling some new chef heads for the game. Each new head I model makes me more and more disappointed with the first heads I modelled... here's hoping I can resist the urge to go back and start remodelling everything!!

[Disclaimer: Doubt all of these will make it into the final game. Although I have a soft spot for box head...]

[ThilDuncan]

Little teaser for the Space themed levels we're working on at the moment...

[That little spec in the top middle is actually our test level]

Gameplay-wise we're looking at creating a lot of little modular pods which can move around while the player's are doing their thing (shuttling between different kitchen area). We also want to include random meteor strikes which can breach the hull of your kitchen and will try to suck you out into the big old nothing of space - kind of like the boat sliding mechanic but a little more violent

We also spoke about using the fire extinguisher to zip around in Zero G like Wall-E... mighty tempting... what do you guys think... too far?

Ill post up an image of the space level when it's a little further along!

In other news Oli has also been tinkering with the friction of our players to allow for cool slidy ice controls as well as the ability to create one-way slopes which I can hopefully put to fiendish use when I get back to creating levels next week. He's also starting looking at death, and what happens to our players when they fall off cliffs or into lava or into the sea etc...

P.

[hube]

Looks amazing Really like the concept you've got here. Followed.

[ThilDuncan]

First things first: @hube : Thanks a lot! 'preciate the kind words

Here we are in june! Another week has gone by and another hundred or so biscuits have been consumed in the office (/living room).

We've been busy putting together footage for a sort of promotional video which has really helped us focus up the art (even if it meant that the design had to take a bit of a backseat for a while) Hopefully we'll get to share that with y'all soonish!

This week things are a bit more back to normal. We're looking into our single player campaign (whether or not there will be an actual campaign in single player remains to be seen, but we've been doing lots of experiments letting players switch between multiple chefs, controlling 2 chefs with the 2 different thumb sticks (and even controlling 2 chefs with 1 thumbstick!)

Here's a quick sneaky gif of some of the fine foods which you can currently construct as part of the game:

[We have pizza too, but that got cut off the start of the gif]

Oh and as promised here's a sneaky look at one of the more functional space levels we have in the game (the room on the far left can be moved up and down when other player's press a switch in the main chamber- More happy co-op rage ensues :-) )

It's still lacking a lot of the extra props etc. which will really bring it to life but I'm fairly pleased with how it's coming along.

Our plan this month is to look at player progress (unlocking levels, saving, scoring all that fun stuff) as well as creating a compelling single player experience. Looking forward to having something more than a random collection of levels soon : ) (Oli is currently working on controls for single player which allow us to switch between chefs. It involves lots of sighing so everyone be kind to him ;-) )

P.

[ThilDuncan]

Single player tests went better than expected. To begin with we were banging our heads against a wall trying to make the multiplayer experience fun with only one player performing all of the tasks, and it just wasn't going anywhere, it was still quite entertaining but without a team to divide the tasks between it felt much less enjoyable.

We tried out a number of different approaches:

- One player controlling one chef (not as fun as multiplayer)
- One player controlling two chefs with two thumbsticks (worked for Brothers, but for us. not so much)
- One player controlling two chefs with one thumbstick (similar to the mario cherry power up, actually lead to some pretty hilarious scenarios so we may yet find a use for this one)
- One player controlling two chefs and switching between the two (Now we're getting somewhere...

...we slowed down some of the interactions, meaning you could leave one chef merrily chopping up some veg while the other heads off to wash some dishes, then they swap back etc. we build out some slightly more maze-like levels and then (crucially) we changed up the scenes to only require the player to cook one slightly more complicated recipe.

What this means now is that we have some really cool puzzle levels where players have to find the optimum route to navigate all the chefs around the level and complete the dish before the time runs out. It's different but it's a much more rewarding singleplayer experience than we could have hoped for!)

Oh and for anyone curious the contextual wrapper for singleplayer is that you're playing as a rival evil cooking corp who are trialing slightly shonky mechanical cooks to try and compete with the brave multiplayer chefs, thus neatly explaining away all the weird player swapping and bizarre maze-like kitchens 

THIS WEEK. We have been looking at saving the game and building out our game world/level select screen. Here's a sneaky peak of how it looks in Maya at the moment:

Going for a slightly more abstracted version of the art style from the game Kind of like a toy town version of the world. It's perhaps a little sparse at the moment so I think I'll probably add a little more detail and some particles for snow/fog etc. when we get it into Unity.

More on exactly how it functions when we've got it running (and when we've fully decided which approach we're actually going to go with :D

P.

[ThilDuncan]

Oh and since it's friday here's some experiments we've been doing with different tile flip animations:

Any preference? Think we're leaning towards the one on the left...

P.

[slarti88]

Any preference? Think we're leaning towards the one on the left...
P.

Yep left one for sure

[Bluebutton]

Oh and since it's friday here's some experiments we've been doing with different tile flip animations:

Any preference? Think we're leaning towards the one on the left...

P.

I prefer the one on the left, but have you considered having the building pop first, then the trees shortly after? Just a thought.

The art style looks gorgeous and the gameplay looks really fun!

[ThilDuncan]

@slarti88: 'ray!

@Bluebutton: Yes, that's what we're playing around with at the moment, we want to get a nice ripple effect when you unlock a new area of the map (Complete with bubbly popping sfx  )