Bon Appétit! This week AppetizeR had our hands full of trying to prepare for the egg-citement of play-test day. Our artists not only were polishing up the final models for play-test day we have also swapped over to a more playful soup pot.
With the new model came incredible shaders for the roaring fires beneath and the burbling broth and ingredients above. Finally our technical artist was kind enough to make each parameter available for manipulation… sadly one of our programmers was having a bad thyme with Lens Studio.
Our soup-er star of a programmer worked her way through the week resolving a tricky race condition in the ingredient system. The core issue: when multiple players looked at the soup simultaneously, the same ingredient would get added multiple times due to duplicate collision events not syncing properly across users.
After testing and debugging, the fix landed on a per-player ownership model. Basically each non-chef player gets their own plate object, enabled by the GameManager when the chef receives instructions. This eliminated duplicate collisions entirely. It also helps by having such an amazing pot be a shared entity for all the players.
Backlogged known issues include late-joining players triggering a flurry of unhandled events, and noticeable lag when running 4 users in Lens Studio simultaneously — though the core gameplay flow is working. Finally we have also had a response from the spectacle team the day before play-testing
We are somewhat skeptical of Spectacles creating the origin from the hosts device position on session join because we have had consistently inaccurate object spawns. If time permits we may book a session for developer support mentioned.
In addition to making some serious food prep, we prepped for our play-test with our UI/UX designer making the online survey which can be found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdniONfR9OLbqxrauCFsbpqSUkAATLwIXDIkAWS7kuSsdGaIg/viewform?usp=header