Fast Food Tycoon - Sprint 3

  Sprint 3 was a hectic sprint due to the playtest we had. Continuing my role as a 2D Artist, I made a few more sprites that represented the appliances, as well as a few more UI assets. I also worked on sketching out our marketing assets to prepare for the playtest, but apparently we didn’t need that. The sketches were just bare outlines anyway.

Sketch of the Feature Graphic

In the buy screen, I’d like the player to be able to upgrade their appliances, so I made sprites for the drink machine, flat top, fridge, and fryer. In ibisPaint X, there’s a “rectangle” tool you can use with the brush so that you can draw raster rectangles. It’s not like the Photoshop one, which makes a vector shape. Like in modeling, the appliances don’t require a lot (or any, actually) of curves, so I could easily just make rectangles, edit them with perspective transform, and build from there. My job was made a lot easier by the fact that the appliances were already modeled, so I could use them as references. Although, for other projects, 2D art should be done before 3D art…

Fridge Sprite

Fryer Sprite

Other than the work I did this sprint, I’d like to talk about building the game, because it ended up being unnecessarily annoying. When I first uploaded the build we made for the assignment on how to make an .aab file to Google Play, it got mad at me because our target API level was 30, not 31. That was shocking to learn since our team took the time to go over the tutorial and we followed all the steps on the tutorial. Since it outputs the “correct” thing, we figured we were ok. But since we’re using Unity 2020, it doesn’t come with API level 31. When we put the target level API to 31 in the build settings, Unity would ask if we wanted to upgrade the API (and then proceed to not do that at all). We found out this problem during class the Tuesday before playtest day. That was a lot of unneeded stress.

To solve the issue, you needed to download the newer APIs. I thought the school computer would allow us to do so, but it doesn't. Me and another teammate spent time figuring out how to do that. My solution was to download Android Studio and then download the higher APIs from there.

Android Studio settings, where you can download the newer SDKs if Unity isn't letting you.

I only had to do level 31 but I decided to do up to 33 just in case. Unfortunately, that took about an hour to download. And to build, it took up to an hour and a half. I feel really bad about taking up my teammate’s time. I remember saying, “It would be really annoying if this took more than 10 minutes to build.”

Because we dealt with the build so late, we ended up forgetting a lot of stuff in the build, which made a few things more confusing for playtesters than it needed to be. For example, we didn’t take out the worker primitive in the scene, so players were confused as to why there were two different colored capsules that moved. I’m glad that playtesters could see where our inspirations came from at least.


As for the next sprint, I continue my role as the 2D Artist. I really wanted to do a bit of coding so then our programmer wouldn’t need to grind on those tasks, but then he said it’d be faster for him to do it himself. The rest of us aren’t as good at coding as he is after all. With programming tasks assigned, I gave myself more UI related tasks. Currently, our menus are just blockouts, so I figure I can make them look prettier. Also, I’m going to put in a recipe book so that players can know how to make the food they serve. I’m pretty sure players can tell how the food is made from the food sprites and appliances in the scene, but it doesn’t hurt to have a book.

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