Sizzle
Sizzle is the proof-of-concept for a casual cooking game. As the programmer and co-designer I was able to:
Learn how to use a new game engine (Godot)
Make an interface which is easy to understand and use
Create satisfying interactions and reactive effects
Have a complete and polished product ready within the 3-week deadline
Artwork and additional design by Max Alford
I built a dialogue system to explain the mechanics and recipes
In addition to progress bars and icons, sound and particle effects are used to give feedback for actions.
The system for defining recipes repurposes Godot's node tree editor, typically used for organizing scenes, into a decision tree editor. A recipe progresses as the player adds ingredients corresponding to any leaf of the current node. This setup has several advantages:
No scripting required allows anyone to make changes
Steps can be quickly added, removed, changed, or rearranged
A list of valid inputs at any step can be created from the set of leaf requirements. This allows automatically creating hints, warnings, or blocking input of ingredients that don't match
We experimented with normal mapped sprites to be used for reflective objects like the pots, pans, and knife. This video shows a 2D sprite with a point light orbiting it in 3D space.
The original object was modeled in Blender with geometry nodes, then baked out to diffuse and normal map textures.
Ultimately we decided that there wasn't a need for the effect at this point in the project, and there wasn't time to redo art in the short time we had allotted.