#agpw

A T-Posing chef that you spin with the joysticks to make sandwiches.

That’s it that’s the entire game.

The idea originally started out as a game about spinning blades to slice up bits of pepperoni onto a piece of bread, with you looking down through a slicing machine from above. The top down perspective was derived from my own game, and was the first thing to go. For the sake of clarity we wanted the bread to move down along a counter as more and more ingredients were added.

However now the idea of a machine slicing the food bears a problem, as it’d be tricky to show the player the blades and how fast they were moving. One way to make a gigantic set of blades that moved with the bread down the conveyor, however that was just weird. Instead of rejecting the idea we decide to play with the absurdity and so the great T-posing spinning chef was born!

I was responsible for the programming on this project and i thoroughly enjoyed this week.  Slicing the food proved to be a fun technical challenge. My solution was by far not the most realistic one but worked well enough for the context of this silly little game.

The slicing system works by tracking how many times the food is struck by the blades once it enters the tracking volume. The slicer component is notified each time a blade passes through a food object, and once the food leaves the tracking volume, all cuts are applied at once. Unfortunately the volume and blades were very thin which meant that despite the chef spinning at absurd speeds, only a few cuts would be registered. Even with the most ridiculous hitboxes.

To solve this i made the system lie. All great games are riddled with lies to keep the player happy so i thought it was time to start using my own. Each time a slice is registered, the slice count is not increased by one, it is instead doubled. This way the player can get satisfyingly thin slices of cucumber, even through they only cut the thing four times.

This week has been really fun and it’s been nice to collaborate and ‘not have everything go up in flames like it normally does. It’s been fun making dishonest yet satisfying systems all in the name of the silliest concept. I’d like to polish this project and put the finished game up on itch for everyone to enjoy at a later date.

Thanks for reading