Fast Food Tycoon - Sprint 1

 On this project, I was the lead, so for the first sprint, I mostly went about writing up a bunch of design drafts for how different parts of the game would function(basically pre-production type stuff). Other than that, I set up the UI for the player and the order receipts.

The programmer needs to have a scene set up in Unity in order for them to be able to start working on anything. And before that, we need a map draft that details what the scene looks like so that another teammate can start making the map with primitives.

Map Draft of the Restaurant

Here's what the primitive my teammate made looks like:

Working on design drafts felt mostly simple, yet complicated at the same time. I left a few notes on each draft as well as pointed out numbers to test so we all knew what our variables were. Putting thoughts into words on paper is hard. I get worried about not being precise enough. Most of my problems were mainly me getting anxious about missing something early that might be hard to change if I didn’t write it down now. But, I suppose we can edit it later anyways.

Other than making a draft for the map, I made drafts for the fridge selecting minigame, fryer minigame, and order building minigame. These minigames are pretty short, as they really only require you to tap or drag something.  I want the game to move pretty fast, so having these little tasks take your concentration away for a bit shortly is paramount. They take as long as the player takes to do a simple action. Not only do I want the player to focus on how to spend the money they make, I want them to focus on actually making the money.

Fridge Selection Minigame Design Draft

The easiest task of this sprint was making the spreadsheets. At this point in time, we don’t really need to think up that many ingredients or recipes. To get the game out, we really only need at least one or two food items on the list. As a result, the list is pretty small. I even made it so that we can easily change the price of what the food costs by editing the profit percentage. The hardest part of the spreadsheet was figuring out how Google Sheets worked.

The Menu Spreadsheet

Now that the first sprint is done, there really isn’t a lot for a designer to do. In fact, most of the team worked on game assets for this sprint. I am not at all a modeler, so I’m lucky to have them. I’m not the best at coding either, and I think I’d only end up coding something our programmer would have to spend extra time fixing. I am a little worried that having only one person doing the coding might not be enough to have a playtestable electronic build, but the programmer seems confident he can get it done. I am somewhat of a graphic artist, so I figure for the next sprint, I’d be able to work on some of the UI for the selecting minigames. I want to also work on drawing a few sprites so that they can be used on several screens. I guess technically you can use 3D models there, but in my opinion I think they’d probably look kind of ugly there.  I imagine most of my work for the future will just be making a bunch of UI and sprites since there’s not really any other design other than looking at numbers.

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