Chop Chop: Postmortem

"Chop! Chop!" was created in 5 weeks as a university project. For many of the other team members, this was their first experience using Unity and I'm sure they couldn't have been prouder of the outcome. This game ended up winning the every single category, a first time for the class! I'll give my fellow developers a chance to say something, but I have a lot to say and share, and I want to continue watching the TGA, so let's begin!

Needing to Chop-Chop with "Chop! Chop!'s" Development

To be honest, the five week timeline is a bit misleading. It was closer to 4 weeks of slow progress followed by a whole week of intense crunch. We had a lot of other responsibilities hindering us for those first four weeks, not that the last week was any better. We were able to do it all, because we had to finish the game. The last day ended with my first all-nighter editing the trailer together.

One of our challenges was a lack of direction, early on. We never established a leader, but perhaps I was too afraid of being assertive and overbearing. Eventually, when I noticed not a long of progress was happening, I realized I needed into a production role and start delegating tasks for the rest of our team. Progress started to pick up afterwards.

Giving Chop Chop a Distinct Style

When we first came up with this idea, I knew the visual style would be important to nail down. I went to work on finding the right palette, which had a lot of candidates. Eventually with the help of my partner, I settled on Linear Color Palette Basic by GrafxKid due to its bright, saturated and flexible color choices. I also settled on using a single UV Texture for everything, with the color palette and their gradients. The base shader for our custom assets was Unity's Toon Shader (UTS), which allowed for a lot control on the shadows and color map. I think this allowed the game to stand out visually.

I think the "low poly" models with gradient texture was the right way to go as it was quick and easy to create and iterate on. I did a lot of research on what a fedual japanese resturant could have looked like, and added some Western inspirations in the end result. I wanted the restaurant to feel like it was maintained by a straggly cat who's trying to get by with their new job. Because of this, you spot damages on the wall, table, and shelf. The shelves are kind of organized, but mostly in disarray with one of the bottles toppled over. There's even a Kunai stuck to the wall to imply an early mishap or conflict. I'm a little sad that all this effort had such a short presence in the trailer.

I say "low poly" because even though the visuals are quite simple, the poly count is deceivingly high. I didn't want curves to look too blocky, so more vertices and edges were used to make sure the curves were smooth. This visual choice did come at the cost of the game's performance, especially on a browser, which we were aware of. We were willing to make the sacrifice because the focus was suppose to be the game's trailer. Because of that, a significant amount of my time and focus was on making models for the restaurant and game juice.

Putting the Juice into Making Soup

The chopping mechanic I think is the most interesting to talk about. I originally was going to let another team member handle this, but I realize that if I was doing the art, it would be faster and more effective for me to iterate on it. One of my concerns was how to make adding new ingredients as painless as possible. In the end I think I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

First, I would create the ingredient model, usually starting with a cylinder with 11 loop cuts. This is so that when I split it into pieces, they would make 12 evenly chopped pieces. Afterwards, I would try to maintain the cuts on the same axis as I adjust the scale and the position to resemble the ingredient I was going for.

The chopped version is a separate model, where I relocate the pivot of the chopped pieces to the location of the cut. That way, when we're animating the knife and paw position,  we can simply tween them towards the position of the pivot for each piece. The paw also rotates the closer it gets to the root. As the pieces are being cut, they slowly spread towards the right. We turn those pieces into rigidbodies after being chopped when they're slid into the pot. This system allowed the creation of new ingredient to only take 15-30 minutes, which saved us a lot of time on that final day.

All animations in this game are purely tweened to make them fast to create and iterate with. I usually would use LeanTween, but I found really good potential with DOTween, which had a punch option, perfect for the cameras and UI!

I think my favorite detail with the chopping is the Chaotic Evil cat paw. It was inspired off of Legend of Pipi and Desktop Cat Cursor and it looks so silly and stupid :3. I thought of this almost immediately while we were coming up with the idea and drew up the quick concept art above. I also really liked the detail that the sword that the cat is using is so absurdly long as a knife that the cat has to hold it by it's blade rather than the handle.

A Beautiful, But a Bit Bland Broth

Like every game I've worked on, it was really tough. The sacrifices we made for focusing on the trailer and presentation meant that the game itself has a couple of noticeable gaps. I would love to finish this game, and try to give it a bit more substance, but at the same time I know it's unlikely to happen any time soon. This game has a lot of potential, but I need to work on something else for a while.

Maybe it'll be worth revisiting soon. I have more than a few ideas for it. I think there should be a quest system with customers to make the soup for. It would give a reason for why you might want a particular soup. I think the garden could look a bit more like a zen garden from a dojo. Some more weapons would be nice too, either as cosmetics or other mechanics. We definitely need a mouse sensitivity setting first.

I'm honestly grateful for the team I had. Despite their limited experience, everyone came around and did what they could to make Chop Chop what it is. I don't think this game would be as finished as it is without any of them.

The Chop Chop Team

Anyways, that's enough from me! Here's the rest of the team's thoughts:

Ayush Bandopadhyay

For this project I learned how to set up environments, specifically terrain with foliage, grass, and skybox. I think that I was able to create a usable low poly environment that fit our game. Some improvements that could be made are my overall artistic composition of the scene and understanding of color.

James Chen

I worked on the code of the project, specifically on the QTE system and launching vegetables, as well as working on the UI of the game. I think I made the concepts of the original idea possible, as well as making the game more gamelike using UI and transitions. Some things that definitely need improvement on are more familiarity on Unity and coding practices, as well as adding more customizability and readability with how I develop code. I also need to work on balancing my time better.

Toby Pang

I’m really glad I worked with this group. I didn’t expect us to win the class’s grand prize! This was such a rewarding experience. I was responsible for the initial implementation of the grappling mechanic and worked on many SFX and VFX. If we had more time, I think we could have expanded the game loop further by adding a customer/order system, which would make the game feel more cohesive. Anyway, I think our core loop is already pretty fun to play, and I’m satisfied with what we achieved.