This game was designed and developed in 3 days in a team of 4 people. It was composed of 2 game designers and 2 artists.
I created the pitch and overall idea for the game based on this theme gave by the School Game Jam organisation. After creating the team, we wanted to work on a food related game and this idea of an abusive consumption society emerged. By serving junk food for as much customers as possible with really precise requests as fast as possible, we would stress the player enough to make him realized how bad this society is. Moreover, by asking only a certain percentage of food, we are adding this idea of waste that often come with consumption.
More than a game made in 3 days, this was for me a real challenge to program the slicing and area calculation scripts. While sliding your finger on your phone, the game detects a entry and exit collision point onto the food. From that, scripts will divide the concerned mesh in multiple parts and will create new meshes to fill the holes. After all of this is done, I'm calculation the area of both parts to then know how far from the wanted percentage the player was.
The first game jam day was used as a set up. We received the theme in the morning, brainstormed a pitch and created teams. After few hours, I was ready to start programming. I started by finding a way to cut the mesh of the food elements in a clean way. The goal was to avoid over-complicated solutions as we only had 3 days of work available.
I found a tutorial that helped me design the code architecture and explained the method he used pretty well. He was working on a lightsaber item that cut meshes, exactly what I need to work with. I adapted his method for mobile devices and touch inputs for our game.
The first day came to an end and almost all of the mesh cutting part was over.
At the beginning of day 2, I quickly started by cleaning and optimizing the mesh cutter script to our props. It was a bit messy and not so clean at first but with some tweaking over the first half of the day, we came to a game ready result. We could now cut any designated mesh, with touch inputs, on a mobile device.
The second difficult part was to figure a way to find these meshes area to compare them to the customer desired value. The solution i came up with pretty quickly was not to calculate the whole mesh area but to do that on a flat projection of it. We now had 2 objects to cut, the visual mesh of the food prop and its invisible flat projection. By cutting the projection, we could now by subtracting the base area to the cut one to define the percentage of the 2 food parts.
With those two mechanics done by the end of the second day, we were just missing the visual and UI part of the game.
We started the day by implementing all the 3D props and 2D sprites to build the play area. It was done pretty quickly using some tricks as, for example, the customer is always the same character that simply loop an animation of moving from the left of the screen to the right.
I finished by adding some rules to the game, a countdown, and a way to lose. The artists added visual stickers that we would paste onto the buttons in game for a better overall understanding.
That closed day 3 and the game jam production time.