Bon Appétit! This week, the AppetizeR team has been digesting feedback from our recent play-taste-testing sessions — though there are a few pre-meal hurdles worth clearing first.
On the development side, one of our programmers ran into significant challenges linking the soup shader to respond dynamically to ingredients being placed into it. Unfortunately, the reactive soup wasn’t quite ready to serve by playtest day. The game’s win and lose states were also missing from the build — another notable gap that testers encountered.
The playtest sessions themselves surfaced some technical difficulties as well. The platform experienced connectivity issues throughout, most likely stemming from a combination of overheating hardware, weak signals, and general desyncing — and the game did require some coaxing to get players into connected sessions. Since this was our first time running back-to-back sessions, the overheating problem escalated quickly, leading to serious performance degradation. This manifested in what one of our programmers is calling “ghost sessions”: states where the game indicated a connected multiplayer session, but each player’s instance appeared to be running independently, with other players’ actions not registering and their avatars not appearing at all.
Players also noted some difficulty reading on-screen text and distinguishing between ingredients visually, though this was partially mitigated by the guided format of the playtest.
On a positive note, when sessions did connect successfully, the experience delivered exactly what we’d hoped for. Natural conversations emerged, players laughed and riffed off each other, and the head chef / assistant chef dynamic shone through — the chefs were already cooking up creative analogies to communicate with their partners. A strong sign for the core recipe.
The art, too, received glowing feedback. Our resistance to going fully realistic helped sidestep the uncanny valley effect while still producing appetizing, visually appealing assets. And to top it off, our artists have begun delivering the ingredient visuals needed to populate the in-game UI correctly! See a little squishy vegetarian option below!
We were also applauded for the simple but effectiveness of the face filter making everyone in the session a chef with a classic moustache!