Week 10 - Checkpoint 4 - Cooking and Customers (2)

A good news of this week is that I finally was able to upload the game on itch.io and could get feedback on it (*phew*). Therefore, in this week's devlog, besides showing you some updates that I made in the game and discussing considered solutions for its drawbacks so far, I will also summarise comments that I received on this Thursday.

Last week, I did spend most of the time on Alice's cooking process as it caused me a headache when there were some hard-to-solve downsides then. I already mentioned the most obvious problem that was 'two dishes cooked from three ingredients (instead of four)' situation for example. Therefore, I implemented some cooking rules to avoid generating unexpected dishes. Firstly, Alice will not cook anything if she takes either two similar ingredients or two ingredients in incorrect order. Also, if there are redundant ingredients except the necessary ones, Alice will cook an ugly looking thing. The reason for those rules is that I can control what items in specific slots in Alice's inventory are going to be cooked after pressing the C keycode. 

(Player can navigate to the recipes via pressing R)

(Alice only cooks when there are correct items in order based on the recipes above)

(I did press the C keycode but Alice did not cook anything)

(Cooks a ** (cannot tell exactly the name lol) looking dish when taking too much things)

This week, I also added a 'happiness bar' to every customer. It also represents the waiting time of them. Different types of customers will have different speeds of happiness decline, depending upon their background information. For example, all in-queue customers have the same initial happiness score when appearing. However, because office men are always in a hurry coming back to work, their waiting time, as well as happiness, will decrease faster than students. 

(Hope that you could see the tiny changes at the happiness bars and the differences between two customers =)))

Currently, my Blue can pick several dishes up. However, even though there are two types of them that Blue should be able to grab at the movement, she still can only pick one up instead of two. I did not have enough time to fix it before building the game on time, so I cannot point the problem out now. A comment on the game from another player suggested that it might be due to one of its components. Therefore, I may have a look at it to find the actual issue and solve it if possible. 

(My Blue can take this type of dishes)

(but not this one)

It seems like there are not many new elements in the game this week, but implementing the things mentioned above was such a demanding task. However, it is so glad to see those implementations work quite well in the initial despite several drawbacks of them. I will try to make bigger updates for the game and hope to be able to show them in the next blog.