I made this game when I was following an education at Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam. At the time, I was quite inexperienced with Unity and coding in general. The result of this 8 weeks project still blows my mind. I made this game together with another teammate.
This game is a simple game that requires you to cook food for your customers. You have two levels. Level one requires you to help three customers within the time limit. Level two is an endless level. The gameplay loop is simple: a customer appears with their desires, you can use the mouse to grab the meat and put it on the BBQ, you wait until the meat turns brown, you give the meat to the customer, and you gain points. Waiting too long, and your meat will turn black, and you will lose points if you give that to the customer. Luckily there is still a trash can. You can also drop the food on the ground. This will make the food green. Don’t give that to the customer BTW… The BBQ will also turn off over time. This is indicated by the blue colour. You need to change their coals. To do that you require to click on the BBQ again.
Looking back on this, I am impressed! Our skills at the time weren’t the best, but we still made a fully realized gameplay loop. Besides that, this game got a good start menu as well! From the cute rotating background, to the clickable buttons. There is a level select menu, a control's menu, an audio settings menu, a credits menu and a quit button! Also, we left a funny Easter egg into the audio settings! You can select three songs. Two are serious background songs and one is… Well… A bit unprofessional… We had a teacher at the time that had a certain type of humour… And well… This is a BBQ game… So we include a funny (meme) song that was a Thomas the tank engine remix of some BBQ foot massage song… The good thing was, he loved it! A bit of humour with these types of school assignments should be possible. So long, I don't release the game in this state.
There were also plans to make a mobile version with scaled back graphics! A mobile version will fit the game well! Sadly, a time limit can be a big pain…
But besides the copyrighted BBQ song and my praise on what we have achieved at the time… There are some notable bugs as well. This game was made in 2017, and I have learned a lot over time. There are a lot of bugs that I do know how to fix now compared to many years ago. Think about collision bugs, audio bugs and even the UI wasn’t all that great as well. The UI doesn’t scale well on every resolution and when you click on something, the rest won’t disappear. You have to manually click everything away if you have opened everything. I even just don’t dare to take a look at my old source code… I assume that it is full of if statements with no functions…
Conclusions:
The important lessons that I want to reflect on this game: I have learned a lot and I made lots of progress over time! I am surprised with what I have made back then in just 8 weeks. Recognizing the faults that were made and knowing how to fix it now is a big achievement! I am considering a remaster to just fix everything (and with everything I am also talking about some of our game design flaws… Most customers want to eat 3 burgers, five steaks, one mushroom and 2 sausages! This game is barely beatable with these types of hungry customers)!
Here is a sketch of the game that I made for our game design document.