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[sakrirafael]

Welcome to Bitter Game's devlog!



Table of contents

Latest post


1. Backstory
2. Flavor creation
3. Illusion of liquid
4. Shape detection
5. Grandfather Pantalon's legacy
6. Small improvements
7. Main menu
8. Gameplay video
9. Machines
10. Machines 2



Backstory:

You have inherited a small beverage company from your grandfather, Pantalon. Now you are ready to follow in Pantalon's footsteps, ready to take what your grandfather once started, to the top of the sales charts.

Pantalon's ghost will help you with your journey through his portraits. Pantalon was a witty businessman, but exceptionally greedy, so his advice is to be taken with a grain of salt as he always used to get into trouble for bribery and corruption.

It's time to blend the aroma you have always wanted to taste. Salty cucumber milk soda? Perhaps. Your only obstacles are the diabolical food standards officers and the need to identify in the cold and competitive food industry.

Video:




Screenshots:
(Still in development)

[sakrirafael]

Also, the main feature!

The player is able to chemically mix his/her own flavors (as seen in the screenshots) and learn the benefits and trade-offs of all the ingredients as he goes. The ingredients are divided into 7 categories: dyes, flavors, sweeteners, emulsifiers, preservatives, miscellaneous ingredients and basic ingredients such as different tiers of water. All the ingredients represent real elements used in product development.

[SimonFelix]

This is a really cool concept, I like the chemical accuracy 

[sakrirafael]

Thank you! I'm trying to make it as accurate as possible, so that emulsifiers and preservatives get to be used too, along with the usual stuff.

[sakrirafael]

You may have noticed that you can play with ingredients in the game, but now I'm going to tell you what information is stored about the ingredients and how the information is used.

For example, here's water.



As you can see, every flavor holds a lot of information, most importantly keywords (watery and fresh in this case).
Most of the variables are used to calculate quite accurately, what happens when you combine multiple ingredients.
The keywords, in addition to a table of phrases and descriptions for common combinations are used to create a written review for the flavor.

In the following ratings, the beverage is called 'Super Lemonade 3000' and water is the sole ingredient.



With more ingredients, the ratings become more versatile. The "artificial intelligence" also recognizes controversial blends
such as energy drinks and some ingredients that are frowned upon.





Currently I'm implementing brewing, distillation, carbonation and aging processes. Yes you will be able to make beer 

[sakrirafael]

A preview of the bottle editor in action.

[sakrirafael]

Illusion of liquid

I realized that the liquid editor looks kind of dead so I did the 3 following things to make it more alive:

1. Animated liquid surface



This was actually the hardest to do, because the liquid model has to stay exactly inside the container.
If you want to do a similar feature, it's just a rigged 3D model with a couple of bones and a sine wave.




2. Animated liquid itself (in 1st picture)

Very easy to implement, it's just a normal map with variable offset.
The model has to be unwrapped just right though.


3. Swaying camera

There are millions of ways you could do this, but here's mine:



The camera is swaying in the x and y directions along a sine wave, and in the z direction along a cosine wave with thrice the amplitude. The camera can also rotate 80 degrees around the beaker's x-axis at a certain distance.

[Citsua]

Woah, I love how clean and polished everything looks. Very peculiar concept but could be fun if well done, subscribing

[sakrirafael]

Thank you, there's been a lot of mopping and redoing to keep it clean.

[boustrophedon]

Looks really nice. Kinda reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon, but better.

[migs]

My inner alcoholic is rejoicing; I didn't know this game was missing from my life.
Looks great, excited to see it develop 

[sakrirafael]

Looks really nice. Kinda reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon, but better.

Thank you! I really appreciate that.

My inner alcoholic is rejoicing; I didn't know this game was missing from my life.
Looks great, excited to see it develop 

Cheers mate! 

[sakrirafael]

I upgraded the AI to recognize different types of bottles!

This is how it works.



The lines are what the AI sees.
The bottle's body is sliced into 4 pieces, which are later compared to each other to find a name for the shape.
All the white lines represent the bottle's average width in that section, and the black lines connect the slicing points.
For the ease of comparison, the values are then normalized, so that the widest point gets a value of 1 and all the other points get a smaller decimal value.

Now the important part.
The averages are now compared together, in this case the third section from the top is much wider than the middlemost slicing point, so it tells us that the bottle becomes a lot wider somewhere in the third section. Also, the bottle's top is very narrow in comparison to the widest point of the bottle; this confirms that the bottle can be called for example, onion-shaped.

The AI then checks if the cap, bottom part and material fit with the dimensions of the bottle. For example, making a soda bottle bottom out of glass might not be a good idea.

Next, the whole process is translated into a snippet of text:

(This is for a different bottle)



It might be worth noting that the body of the bottle is divided into 42 'bones'.

[sakrirafael]

Redefined backstory:

You have inherited a small beverage company from your grandfather, Pantalon. Now you are ready to follow in Pantalon's footsteps, ready to take what your grandfather once started, to the top of the sales charts.

Pantalon's ghost will help you with your journey through his portraits. Pantalon was a witty businessman, but exceptionally greedy, so his advice is to be taken with a grain of salt as he always used to get into trouble for bribery and corruption.

It's time to blend the aroma you have always wanted to taste. Salty cucumber milk soda? Perhaps. Your only obstacles are the diabolical food standards officers and the need to identify in the cold and competitive food industry.

Pantalon is based on one of the most important principal characters found in commedia dell'arte, a form of theatre. The character of Pantalone is entirely based on currency and ego, for he has the highest regards for his intelligence, but at every step he becomes the butt for every conceivable kind of trick. With little else to occupy his thoughts after a life as a tradesman or merchant, Pantalone is the metaphorical representation of money.

Here's Pantalon talking:



Pantalon assists the player in any matter.

[migs]

Holy hell that last animation; pure unadulterated nightmare fuel.
Love it.

[sakrirafael]

Holy hell that last animation; pure unadulterated nightmare fuel.
Love it.

That's what happens when you piss him off 

[sakrirafael]

I've been doing a lot of little bugfixes and small improvements. Mainly I added a bunch of info about everything, to make the gameplay more engaging.
I'll let the pictures speak for themselves (Some info might still be wrong):

Info about flavors:


Info about ingredients:


Info about bottles:

[sakrirafael]

I have finally finished the main menu. I'm not sure if it's interactive enough, if you're reading this and have a suggestion, please tell me!

I absolutely love the waving swizzle sticks though. Anyways, here's a couple of gifs:




This one you might have seen, if you have seen Bitter's trailer on my steam concepts page (Link)

[sakrirafael]

I'm currently working on trailers and stuff for Bitter's demo release, so I had to record some gameplay.
Here's a raw, unedited preview of Bitter. Sorry about the loading screens:

[sakrirafael]

I'm working on a new idea. I thought it would be awesome if you could build and upgrade the machines which you will use to make the beverages. Fermentation machine, distillation setup and so on.

This is the configuration:
The painting is Pantalon, your mentor.



This is the room so far, before the machines: