Fast Food Tycoon - Sprint 2

After the first sprint, there isn’t really much for me to design gameplay wise. We wrote design drafts for just about everything we needed to make a complete game. So for this sprint, I mainly went about making sprites for the various food items we’d have in game. Other than that, I also made the buy screen UI and a menu for the cooked food items in the order building minigame. To be honest, I definitely don’t think I did too much this sprint, since my cards were simple one point cards.

Making sprites wasn’t too hard, but I’m still an amateur artist, so they don’t have that refined and crisp look that other games would have. Instead of going on my laptop to draw, I used my iPad. I’m not a fan of Photoshop, so I like to use more artist-oriented software. The iPad version is nowhere near the PC version, and on my laptop, it makes everything lag really hard. I usually use ibisPaint X, which is a popular mobile app for a lot of artists since it’s free and can do a bunch of stuff. I made them 256x256, which is bigger than they probably should have been, but when making the buy screen, I found that it wasn’t that much bigger than what I ended up using in the game.



Blocking out the buy screen UI was simple, but tedious. Aligning all the parts takes a lot of time. Surprisingly, making the content scroll was incredibly easy (literally less than 10 seconds!). Although, since I wanted it to have tabs for what the player can buy, I needed to do a bit of coding so that the player can switch between the tabs. Unfortunately, I managed to mess that part up, so the programmer had to fix it for me.


While making the UI, I ended up realizing that I hadn’t really thought about things to buy other than ingredients and employees. I added in a tab for upgrading appliances. Players should be able to upgrade the stats of their appliances, but I couldn’t really think of any other stats other than how much each appliance could hold. We could make the cooking appliances cook faster, but that doesn’t make any sense realistically. Also, a flat top being upgraded to hold more patties doesn’t make sense either. I also ended up realizing that for the employees, I couldn’t think about what other stats they could have other than speed. One potential stat I had in mind was happiness. If the employee wasn’t happy working at the restaurant, they’d leave after some amount of time. I was thinking we could let the player change how much they could pay their employees, and if they didn’t pay enough, the happiness would go down.

One task I added last minute for this sprint was to draw a sketch for the game icon. The 1st electronic build is due on Tuesday, so I figured I’d get a leg up on doing the marketing images. It takes me forever to draw even the simplest of things. I hope the sketch is good enough to pass review.


As for now, I’m working on sketching out the feature graphic for our game. I’m thinking of getting a shot of the scene, but the models haven’t been set up in the scene yet. I also need to make sprites for the appliances. Now that there’s an appliance upgrade menu, I need to make sprites for that. For the most part, I’ve ended up being the UI person. I feel really guilty that the programmer had to do all of the coding. He can handle it, but it’s a gigantic crunch. For the next sprint, one of the modelers is coding how the customers work, so there’s some help there. I think that in the sprint after that, I should also contribute some coding work. The sad thing is that if I did, I will probably end up making it so that the programmer ends up doing my task for me.

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