The Perfect Bowl News

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

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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
  

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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.

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As you may notice, this update is a little late. The month of July has been pretty busy so I couldn't work on The Perfect Bowl as much. Additionally most of the work done is on systems so there isn't much going on visually. I suspect this would be the trend moving forward as I would also be focusing on the actual meat of the game which is story related stuff.




[h2]Unity Dialogue System Plugin[/h2]
This is where the bulk of my time working on The Perfect Bowl has been.
Trying to pickup a new system is time consuming but from what I've seen so far, this would be worth it in the long run.


[h2]Shifting viewports[/h2]
Getting this to work was quite tricky.
This was done using two cameras, manipulating their viewport transforms and FOVs using Tweens.
It took me awhile to understand that I had to make sure I had two separate post processing volumes covering each camera so that each camera has their own bokeh effect.
Also each camera needed to have its own "UI Camera" as I wanted the dialogue UI only to appear in the customers side.
The most tedious part however was needing to change the anchor values for ALL the UI in the assembly viewport. When I started development, I did not anticipate the need for two separate dynamic viewports (which was dumb in hindsight) and made the UI work only for a full screen viewport.


[h2]Writing The Narrative[/h2]
The part that I dread the most ːsteamsadː
For all its pretty visuals, The Perfect Bowl is actually a narrative game first and foremost which means there is a lot of stress in making a really good story with memorable characters.
To be honest, I tried putting this off to a later stage because:

1. I've been thinking about it as much as possible before I start on it
   
2. I'm scared to do this part
   

But the time has finally come where I cannot delay this any further. If I'm to make a player (or publisher) remotely interested in continuing the The Perfect Bowl, I'd have to start now. I've done my research and understand that writing is an iterative process just like game development so I just have to trust the process and know that it will get better over time.


Didn't work on any bug fixing this time.

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Check out my first post on the game I'm currently working on, The Perfect Bowl, here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2976790/view/4264427597925989204

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