Introduction
Launch Time Diner is a VR game set in space where the player runs a food truck that serves unique and wacky foods to alien customers across the galaxy. This game was developed for a few months from August 2021 to November of 2021 as an 8 person team. The game was developed in Unity with Steam VR.
Unique Mechanics
Our goal in Launch Time Diner was to make it strange and unique to cook up and serve food to the customers of the game. For example, once the player is ready to serve the food up, they throw it at the customers in order to deliver it. The various machines that cook food have strange effects as well. One is a floating ball of fryer grease and another is a mixing machine that combines items into something new. There were plans to make all sorts of new machines and order possibilities in the future as well.
What I Did
Launch Time Diner was an interesting game creation experience for me because while it was set in virtual reality, I did not have a VR headset on which to work on the game, so all my work was done outside of VR without ever seeing the VR application. This was thankfully not very difficult to manage, as I was responsible for working on the customer movement and ordering system along with some of the customer ordering UI that would display on the counter between the player and the customers. Along with the game making experience, this was also quite worthwhile in terms of learning to be flexible when situations are not ideal.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I believe this was a pretty solid project. Unfortunately it was eliminated in the Champlain greenlight process in November of 2021, but it was still generally successful I feel. There was definitely more we had planned for the future to add, such as new planets to travel to and new machines to use to make food, but considering the time frame and our focus being primarily on this concept from around the beginning of October, this was not a bad result at all.
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