Chef Champion

Description:

Chef Champion is an action platformer with hack and slash style combat. You play as a chef trying to become the best in the world, but evil chefs and their minions stand in your way. You will defeat enemies and become stronger by leveling up and purchasing new abilities and weapons that change the way you play. There are six levels containing 3 different food themes along with cute, hand-drawn art. Each level brings unique platforming and combat experiences from the last one. This might be the best food fight ever.

Instructions:

The core goal of the game is to beat all 6 levels, but there is much more to explore and collect throughout these levels. As you progresses through the game you can earn xp, recipes, and attribute tokens that will make your character stronger. You can also buy weapons, dishes, or try new characters at the home kitchen, which is the hub of the game.  There are a total of 3 characters which are all unlocked from the beginning, and they each have different special attacks. The game promotes three different playstyles at close-medium, close, and long ranges. It is up to the player to decide how they “cook” the enemies up.

Controls:

Post Mortem:

What Went Right:

Our team started strong from the beginning and really fleshed out our ideas in our pitch and design documents. This allowed our whole team to be on the same page before we even started development. It also acted as a great reference for everyone to have access to whenever they had questions about a certain aspect of the game. Additionally, there was helpful concept art that helped the programmers and artists get on the same page from the beginning.

For our artists, this was their first time animating, and all the animations were smooth and high quality. The collaboration between the programmers and artists was also very spot on, partially due to the design doc, but also due to the concept art. This allowed the artists to quickly learn how to upload art that is optimized for GameMaker, and allow the programmers to easily import their art.

There were many technical achievements and discoveries that the programming team is very proud of. One is the early implementation of tile sets, this saved our level designer from the headache of objects, and allowed for level design and player and enemy collisions to be much easier. Additionally, our UI programmer was able to make a UI that was simple, yet effective. The UI was also very traditional, so it allowed the player to not be confused or overwhelmed when playing. Finally our player and enemy programmers were able to discover the importance of inheritance, and create more characters and enemies based on a solid foundation in the parent objects.

What Went Wrong:

Although we are very proud of our detailed design document, we realize that we over scoped on our vision. We already had revised from our original vision quite significantly before starting the documents, but because we just kept trimming our original vision, it never became manageable. Instead we should've re-evaluated entire sections and just change the over-scoped areas to a different idea. What we ended up doing though was cutting down the workload, and we kept cutting work all the way up until the last day the project was due. Although our vision wasn't altered significantly, it did end up causing a lot of crunch in the last few weeks.

Another big issue was using GitHub with multiple team members, for some people it was their first time using GitHub with other people, and it was all of our first time using GameMaker and GitHub together, which led to many frustrating problems. This made our project even further delayed since there were many times where someone's merge would cause files to be missing and waste days of productivity trying to fix it.

Finally the last issue was lack of polish and balancing, which goes hand in hand with our mistake of over scoping. Since we already were crunched on time, we had even less time to polish, balance, and fix bugs. This led to us rushing at the end to fix bugs and not having enough time to polish certain areas, or finish more detailed parts of the project.

Changes Made:

The biggest change we made was to our design document, because we over-scoped, we had to cut out many features in our game. One of the biggest cuts was that we removed the lunch level entirely. And as the deadline got closer, we had to cut more and more smaller details. Overall, our vision was not altered by the cuts, but it caused us to make decisions to remove features all the way up until the last week of development.

What We Learned:

It's been mentioned already multiple times, but our biggest failure was that our initial idea was too big, and we realized more and more how big this idea was the closer we got to our deadline. From this failure, we learned that quality is far more important than quantity. Instead of having a bunch of enemies, characters, weapons, and a large skill tree. It would have been better to develop a simpler game focused on a core mechanic, feature, or some twist to separate our game. Instead of trying to add a bunch of stuff to what ended up being a relatively standard action platformer game.

We all learned many technical skills that will be useful as we progress in school and our careers. Our artists learned and improved their animating skills, as well as combining art with a game and how that process works. Our programmers learned how to use GitHub with others, how to do in depth bug fixing and play testing, and how to build and manage larger systems like inventory, UI, enemy and player inheritance, and collisions.