Portfolio Details

Project information

Category: Gamejam project
Project date: 2024
Project URLs: Itchio

My roles in the game

Burgetton was developed for Virtual Core Jam with the theme "Only one button".

I did all the character interactions and movement, the dialogue and localization systems, the mini-game and the client path-finding. I also designed and implemented both the menu and the scoring. Lastly, I wrote the dialogue and translations, and composed a piece for the old menu.

Side note

Burgetton was originally made for a gamejam, and therefore had flaws that could not be solved in time. Recently, I came back and fixed some of these, namely the menu, the lack of localization, and how empty it felt.

The programming

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Burgetton, for me, is the minigame. Gameplay-wise it's very simple, you just connect the wires with the right colours. But on the programming side, we needed a somewhat realistic cable simulation to go with it. Since this was a gamejam there was no time to implement a physics simulation (not to mention it would've been an overkill). Therefore, I decided to implement it as a parametrized cosine function.

\begin{matrix} y = cos (\frac{P \cdot π}{O_{x}} + \frac{π}{2}) \cdot \frac{| d |}{h} + \frac{P \cdot d_{y}}{d_{x}} + O_{y} \\ O = Origin & D = End - Origin & P = x - O_{x} & h = 7 \cdot | d | \end{matrix}

The menu emulates a book. It uses an animator that changes to the specified page through an animation parameter. This is useful to move to open at specific pages, such as not opening the main menu during gameplay.

For the dialogue, I wrote a dialogue system that takes in a list of text and can call functions with each dialogue entry. In the final game this feature is only used to start the game after the last line.

I implemented the localization with Unity's own localization system.

The art

User interface

For Burgetton, my intention was meshing the UI with the game, as that's not only more interesting for the player, but more immersive too. Since in the game you take the role of an underpaid fast food worker, it made sense that the "lives" of the player would be the restaurant's online ratings. Particularly, the site parodies Tripadvisor, turning the owl logo into a cat.

In the same vein, I turned the game menu into a restaurant menu. Each part is divided in sections reminiscent of a diner's menu, and the main one is made after a 2-courses meal. Below there's a comparison of the original menu and my updated one.

More art

In the original game, the food-truck lived in a barren grey wasteland, something that had to be fixed for the update I modelled a little park, with fences, gates, trees, bushes, and even a fountain, and surrounded it with buildings. I kept them simple, like the food-truck was.

The only thing truly missing from the update, is the tune I made for the old main menu.