The Perfect Bowl News

October Update Post:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2976790/view/4463723296443072958

---

Follow Me! ːsteamhappyː

This month will be one of those months where not much is happening in the foreground but significant progress has been made in the background.

I bit the bullet and finally have a dialogue and story planned out for the first few in game days of The Perfect Bowl. Its only something temporary just to give future investors and collaborators an idea of the story and full game loop. This took about half a month.

The remaining half a month I was able to add in some world building elements for better immersion and minor polishing.

Unfortunately no bug busting this time.



[h2]New Location Sequence[/h2]


Welcome to Calor. A country found on the Antarctic planet of Xibalba. What better place to serve a nice warm bowl of Ramen eh?

To help with immersion and storytelling, I have added in some animated sequences to show when the main character has travelled to a new location in Calor. Each location will have its own set characters to meet and local ingredients from which the main character can create special toppings.

[h2]New Day Sequence[/h2]


Games in this genre has a low cost/high effectiveness staple in adding to the world building and that would be the Daily News section. Its an easy way to give players non-essential context but provides an effective illusion that there is a world out there that is very much alive.

I decided to approach this as if the main character was drinking his hot drink and reading the daily on goings both in the country and locally just before he starts his day. Again not essential to the gameplay but helps with the immersion. Plus it provides the player some nice context as to where they are working for the day.

[h2]Daily Sepcials[/h2]


The Daily Specials feature will probably be reworked some time in the future but the general idea is to give the players a variety of ingredients in each location to keep things relatively fresh and something to look forward to.



[h2]Icons[/h2]


The buttons are finally no longer just arbitrary colored boxes that don't mean anything to anybody except me.

---

Follow me! ːsteamhappyː

September Update Post:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2976790/view/4686648306945865981

---

Follow Me! ːsteamhappyː

The last few months working on the arguably more important aspects of the game really took a chunk of my energy and motivation. It felt like I was going nowhere because even though the quantity of task I needed to do was small, completing each task was arduous.

So this month felt really productive with all the bug fixing and additional features and improvements which has been a great motivator.

There is always more to do but I am ready to face them head on until I see The Perfect Bowl out there in the world.



[h2]Topping Mover UI & Topping Border[/h2]


I think I have finally settled on a system that I'm happy with! After some inspiration from looking at Tiny Glade, I took the 3D UI approach mixed with what I had previously. Interactions regarding spatial movement of the topping is presented using 3D arrows while additional features are shown in 2D with a bar that follows the topping.

This way, the bar can be made more compact and less intrusive in terms of visuals and user experience while the main way of interacting with the toppings are associated more strongly with the topping.

I also added a visual to show the bounds of the topping as visual aid for players to understand the 3D space the topping is in.

[h2]Topping Section Title[/h2]


A simple addition to the Build UI so that players can quickly see which section of Toppings they are in.

[h2]Preset Previews Total Cost and Flavour Profile[/h2]


It was already part of the design that I have yet to implement until now. I had to make sure the backend of things regarding Presets was set properly before I had a clear idea of what data I would need to pull from the save files.

The next steps for the Flavour Profile is to convert it into a heuristic graph visualizer.



[h2]Topping Description Popups[/h2]


A simple addition to the Build UI to give the player a quick idea of what kind of cost and flavour the topping will add to the bowl. It also provides a small description space for flavour texts.

[h2]Maximum number of Presets[/h2]
One of the ways that I will be indicating progress to the player is by expanding their photo board to allow more Presets.

[h2]Topping Duplicator[/h2]


A quality of life feature that I think would be quite useful.

[h2]Credit cost and Flavour Profiles for Noodles and Soups[/h2]


Noodles and Soup Types will have their own Credit cost and Flavour profile providing more options to fit the need of the customer. Also would be a neat way to further strengthen the immersion of the game.

• Noodles now follow bowls when serving customers
  
• When clearing table, everything moves towards the new trash buttons position
  
• Soup stream is hidden from dialogue viewport
  
• When loading Presets, noodles will spawn if they contained noodles
  
• When loading Presets, Credits and Flavour Profile updates properly
  
• Detecting if a topping is in the bowl or not is more reliable
  
• Creating a new Preset doesn't rename older presets
  
• Topping UI shows up after topping previewa
  

---

Follow me! ːsteamhappyː

I've been thinking a lot about how I can best tie in world building, story, and gameplay mechanics into a nice cohesive bundle. This would be the crux of the development process.

I've also been researching on how I can make assembling the Ramen bowl more fun which has led me to adding dynamic physics to the noodles. I settled on using softbody physics, after many failed attempts at other dynamic physics like rope physics, hopefully some whimsy to this cosy game.




[h2]Softbody Physics for Noodles[/h2]
What can I say? It brings me such joy and childlike delight to play around with softbody physics and I hope it does for players too.

I am extremely grateful and appreciative that a very powerful realtime physics solution exists in Unity. If you have the means to, I would highly recommend the solutions provided by VirtualMethod, Obi. Without their resources, I don't think I would have been able to create such a stable softbody so quickly.

I actually wanted to allow players to be able to pick up the noodles and play around with it however that brought about too many design and collision challenges. Instead I made it so that the noodles will spawn immediately above the bowls but still allowing for the physics to play some part when moving the bowl around.

[h2]Narrative[/h2]
I've been toying with the idea of showing a map every time the main character travels to different locations and having a nice environmental illustration with the Ramen cart in location even if it doesn't do anything mechanically. I guess its likening it to paragraphs of environmental descriptions in novels. I just need to show enough about whats going on outside the confines of the Ramen cart to give a sense of space and reality.


This section mainly consists of understanding how Obi Softbody works and getting it to work for my game.

---

Follow me! ːsteamhappyː