Latest on Ice Cream Showdown

Here's the latest shop mockup!




I'm really happy with the shop now! There's enough little details to keep you interested for quite a while, yet it's not too busy for your eye, and won't distract from the gameplay. I think there's still a couple little bits I want touched up, but this is pretty damn close to final, with the exception of the new ice cream freezer and counter which isn't in yet.

The various bits of decay and some things like the menu on the table will be added/removed as the gameplay progresses. I'm also considering the possiblity of having the rat move about the scene, and having the rat hole get boarded up and have the rat dissapear until the next shop. He could appear down by the spilled ice cream poking out from under the bench, or over by the trash can, and back at top flipped around and more to the right. I think it'd be fun. :-)


Here's the latest on how the gameplay will work, pasted from an email to the artist:

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When a customer enters the shop they appear in front of the counter in a puff of smoke. Multiple customers will stand in front of the counter at once, side by side. A second row may form behind the first, with the customers between the customers in front, so one less customer will be in the back row than the front row.


Thought bubbles will appear over the customer's head when they order. They will raise their finger, and their mouth will open. The "smile" mouth may be used for this.
I have not yet decided if the customers will order one item at a time, or display a picture of a completed cone, but I'm leaning towards the completed cone right now.


The player will then click on the ice cream and other items in front of them to complete the order. A number will appear in a circle over each item clicked. This "stacks" actions.
The player sprite will complete each of these actions in order.


When the ice cream is done (or before then because it is just another action that can be stacked) the player would click on the customer whose ice cream they have made. The customer then dissapears in a puff and then reappears in a puff in a line in front of the cash register.


The player can serve whomever they want, in whichever order they want, and some customers will be more impatient than others, becoming angrier more quickly, so the player will have to identify these customers and get to them first.


Also, because the customers will line up in front of the register, the player can choose to wait to serve multiple customers at the register at once. This may help them complete the action more quickly because they won't have to move the mouse as much for each step. Customers standing in line will get angry only half as fast as customers waiting for their order because they already have their ice cream and are eating it while in line. (I don't know if we're going to animate that but that is the idea anyway.) This in addition to the speedup will give the player reason to let people line up at the register before getting their money all at once.


For customers in line at the register, the customer in front will be the only one they can serve, so they have to serve them in order. The customer will hold out their money, the player clicks them, then the register, then the customer again. This completes the transaction. I may mix things up a bit by having some customers give exact change, so there will be no third click for them.


I think maybe we'll want to have a dollar sign or something float up from the register then the player completes the transaction, and maybe have coins and/or a bill fly from the tip jar on the screen to a tip jar at the top of the screen with the amount in tips the player has when they get a tip. I find these sorts of animations make a game more fun.


I'm thinking also that we might also want to have some different mouse cursors depending on what the player currently has the mouse over. So if the player is over the ice cream, they see an ice cream scoop, and if the player is over the cash register, they see a hand with index finger outstretched. It is possible that we could have the ice cream scoop cursor display the current color of ice cream the scoop contains if it turns out that the gameplay needs to work in such a way that the player has to click on the player character to actually add the ice cream to the cone.


I mention that last bit about clicking on the player to add the ice cream because I still haven't worked out how we're going to handle the player character getting in the way of the mouse, and I also am not sure yet what would be most fun. Either we have the character animate scooping the ice cream out and flipping it through the air, or we have the ice cream appear on the mouse cursor and then appear on the cone the player character is holding when the player clicks them. This would add another action the player needs to chain with the others, which could make the game more fun. Also I could make it so clicking a customer when in this state puts the ice cream on their head which would anger them and make them leave. :-) Setting the game up like this, where the player has to click on the player character would allow me to place the player character between the register and the ice cream when they are not doing anything else. But then you wouldn't see them move around much except to move over to the right of the register when at that station.


Hm... I could alternatively have the player character stand there out of the way, but when the player clicks the ice cream the ice cream appears in the character's scoop and on the mouse, but that might be confusing. But if I did that then clicking them would make them flip the scoop onto the ice cream. They still wouldn't be moving around much though. It might be really important to have the character move around and animate a little to make the game fun. More important than being able to put ice cream on customer's heads or have one other item the player has to click to complete their task. Hm.

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As you can see, I've fleshed things out more and have a much better idea of how the gameplay will flow. The only major thing still bothering me is what to do with the player character.

Oh and that area above the shop will be where the score display is overlaid, so there might be a tip jar in the upper right hand corner, and the current profit and customer tally on the left.

I'm starting to convince myself that this might actually sell. I was getting a bit depressed with the blue shop before because it just wasn't fun to look at, but the current incarnation is a lot of fun to look at, and if it's fun to look at, the gameplay can only make things better. :-)

I'm looking forward to trying this. The graphics looks great and the gameplay sounds hectic. I too think dollar signs floating up with a che-ching sound would add to the fun.

Depending on the rate of play and if it was hectic and fun I'd buy it, sure.

Keep it up and keep us informed.

i like it! now go make the game!

re: what to do with the player character

I know the stance of the character is what inspired you to make a 'western' ice-cream game in the first place, but if you can't work out how to fit him in so as not to obstruct gameplay, and you don't wanna make him transparent at all (a la Punch Out), can you perhaps get by without him being there at all? Perhaps just have his hand (or arm?) as the mouse pointer?

That way maybe it'll play less like controlling someone else fulfilling orders, and more like fulfilling orders yourself. You could still remind us we're pretending to be someone else (by using the character in different "Yay I did well" or "Sob I did crap" poses)during cut scenes.

Just something that crossed my mind. I'd personally probably prefer he was in the scene during gameplay, but I can't manage to think of a sensible way to do it either.

Swerdnik:
"i like it! now go make the game!"

Ha, HA!

I needed to know what I was going to be making before I could start in earnest. I would have just wasted a bunch of effort if I'd started when I thought I was going to have the customers line up in a queue or at the door, or when I thought the player character was going to move about with the mouse.

Now that I know what I'm going to do, I can move forward with the code and code it nice and cleanly, unlike a certain game where robots build things that I recently completed whose code was a mess. :-)

It's not like it matters, I can't sell it till the art is done anyway and I can tell that's gonna be a while.


77777777:
No, the character is definitely going to be in the scene. At worst, he will be standing to the right of center, or be semi-transparent. I'm not so dead set against those options that I would rather get rid of the character entirely. The character is very important to the game. Without him, it would feel a lot more like what you're doing is just clicking the mouse on hotspots, rather than telling someone what to do. And telling a character what to do is almost always more fun than simply performing the actions yourself, especially if they do what you tell them to in an amusing way.

With that said, I think the character is definitely going to have to move around and animate. And because the user will be able to stack actions, he will have to move around independently of the mouse. But damn, making him transparent so that the user can see what is behind him is just a really bad idea, it might slow the game down too much, and I'd almost certainly have to enable triple buffering which might kill the framerate on some cards.

But then again, if that BlitzPlus benchmark that what's his name did on the general forums is an indicator, reading from the video card is really slow, but writing to it is really fast on all the cards tested, and readong from ram is not slow. So unless there's some wildcard out there that hasn't been tested, triple buffering ought to be fast enough. Maybe.

Hm. One other option would be to have the player character somehow move out of the way of the mouse when blocking an area with a hotspot.

OR... Here's an idea! Since the hotspots in the game will display highlights when the mouse is over them, I could make those highlights display over the character. This would give the appearance of a kind of translucency but not actually involve any translucency at all. It would also not make the character look like a ghost which is another concern with translucency... it just looks wierd.

Now, if I just did that then the player would have to guess that the ice cream they are over is a certian flavor, knowing what was there before. The other items would be easily guessable by the shape. But maybe I could write the flavor of the ice cream in the middle of the highlight, or at the top of the screen in the center, or better yet, at the bottom of the screen where it will be more easy to read while looking down there to click items. Then the player would know what they are over even if they couldn't remember which favor was there, and the character should only rarely completely block one column of ice cream flavors. And maybe I could even make sure they never block the colors by creatively positioning him. He won't be sliding around, he will poof from location to location like the customers. So I could make sure he is centered between two rows, which would position his hand right for scooping the ice cream anyway, and then you'd be able to see the colors on either side of him!

Yeah that just might work! :-)

You can even consider starting out with the guy there, and then zooming him out while making him transparent until he is invisible, then possibly switching to a pair or arms from off-screen to give a 1st person perspective.

You still get to 'show off' the graphics, western feel, etc. while keeping a clear view of the actions you need to perform.

alternatively, you can use the player graphic for an intro or loading screen or something, to add to the western feel

"You can even consider starting out with the guy there, and then zooming him out while making him transparent until he is invisible,"

Haha! Making the character more and more transparent doesn't speed up the rate at which transparenct objects are rendered, so by zooming out until he fills the screen your framerate would like drop below 1. :-) That's only an option with 3D acceleration, which I won't be using because my game is targetted at a large number of people with crappy PC's.

I do plan on using the player characters for more than just seeing their backs though. I haven't decided how or if the main menu will be laid out and if they will be on it, but there's a good chance they will. And there will be a bunch of cutscenes to explain the game's story. And the photo in the back of the shop will be a front view of the character rather than a creepy horror ice cream guy from a google image search. :-)

Swift you are one creeeeeeaazzzy dude and I wish you all the best with this game :) Hope it sells good enough so you can start with this fulltime! :) I may just buy one copie to support you! :)