Bon Appétit! This week at AppetizeR, we’re warming up for Soft Openings — hopefully we can get our experience up to a boil before we serve the staff.
We had a long list of tasks to tackle. The first priority was finalizing the shape and flow of the entire experience: getting players into the Spectacles, teaching them the pinch-and-interact mechanic, and making it clear that they have a party game to play. It initially didn’t seem like an enormous task, but these onboarding challenges have come up again and again. During playtesting, we walked all players through the tutorial ourselves. For Softs, we plan to simply launch the application and see if a “pinch/click this text to chat” dialog is enough to guide players on its own — we’ll see.
Before Softs, we also needed to use headset location data to instantly place an object offset from where a player joins the session. This addresses a recurring bug where the critical game root would disappear into Spectacles nether-space. One of our programmers took the opportunity to refactor a large section of code, giving the architecture much-needed robustness. Nearly everything in the game became local, and to manage the required shared state we turned to sync NetworkEvents — events that are called locally to notify the game manager that something occurred, which then convert that local event into a sync entity event capable of sending and receiving other networked events.
We also set up a starter recipe to onboard players to the game’s interactions, giving each role a simple, approachable introduction to the others.
On the art side, we’ve wrapped up the majority of our assets — the Saltie model, shaders, particle effects, and UI graphics. The game is starting to look polished, even if Lens Studio’s brittle architecture is occasionally rearing its head.
One lingering question is how to smoothly transition players out of the experience. We initially assumed that completing the soup would naturally prompt people to remove the glasses, but we realized we needed a more direct signal that the experience was ending. We had a story draft from last week with no clear way to deliver it to players — so we enlisted the Saltie character to hint that a story exists beneath the place mat in front of them.
In an effort to drive player attention towards the placemats we concluded the experience by offering players a chance to replay a different soup or to flip over their placemat, which would have the short story. Additionally the darkening of the glasses and having a dark room we expected players to have trouble seeing the story and naturally remove the glasses. This didn’t happen… I guess maybe we should tell them directly? We will possibly experiment with a more direct instruction to remove the Spectacles and look for the reveal.
Like being in a pressure cooker we are really feeling the heat and need to get onto making our work much more robust. It really has felt like a major uphill battle every time we push out a new version of AppetizeR. Though we have been consistently implementing great UI work, clean art, and superb models we haven’t been able to make our sessions seamless and the concern for running out of time is coming faster and faster. Our hopes next week are to have a robust, complete play through for the Alumni showcase. Ultimately the most important part of the experience will be to have players be able to play the game and not struggle through connecting to a session. To mitigate this we are going to setup the session and place the main game root in place before handing off the Spectacles to our guests.