Let 'em Cook!
Have you ever felt the stress of working in a restaraunt? Have you ever seen food so dirty you think it's gonna mutate and attack you? Well if you have, you can finally experience both! Let 'em Cook! simulates the stress of having to cook and serve customers while simultaneously being attacked.
This game was created for the Original Game Round of the National High School Game Academy. We were given 3 weeks to pitch and develop a game of our choice, and our team wanted to create a VR game. To maximize the potential of VR, we pitched a cooking/fighting game because you'll be using your entire body to move and interact in the world.
Final gameplay video and demo
The game revolves around Jerry (the player) who is working a late night shift serving food to customers. While customers come and go with orders, mutated food does as well. Using kitchen utensils like knives and pans, you have to kill enemies that invade you and your food, while also making sure the food your making isn't overcooked and ruined.
Progression
Throughout development, we constantly ran to the issue of our scope being too large. We had to cut out an entire enemy/food (french fries) because their physics would have been very janky within VR and we did not have the time to implement it. A lot of why we had to cut down on scope was being we simply couldn't work on the project; the VR headset was located in a building that was closed after 5pm on weekdays and closed on the weekends. Because of this, we couldn't make as much progress as other teams in the time we were given.
For a more technical rundown of our game, we used scriptable objects to organize all of the orders and food, which was much harder to implement than we originally thought. Setting up the actual VR inside Unity was a lot easier, however. When I worked in NoFores, I only used it just to walk around with the headset but implementing actual interactions like grabbing and placing was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
Takeaways
My biggest revelation with virtual reality development was that it has a lot more bugs than normal game development. While I understood this before, the amount of times the Oculus would just turn off or bug out was really annoying. You are also forced to make a low poly game because VR cannot run anything with high fidelity graphics.