New in Buffet Patron Simulator: Final Tweaks, a Video Trailer, and Ship Preparations

In-Game Changes

• White UI text now has an outline for visibility
• New food item: chocolate cake slice (watch me make it)
• Changed the directional light from a realtime light to a mixed light (realtime + baked) so shadows would be higher quality on web

Trailer

I made a trailer for my game: https://youtu.be/KIWuaLkeX5Q (watch me make it)

Updated README and Itch.io Page

Finally, I updated my project’s README and Itch.io page for polish.

Attached: frame from the trailer

Added some posters to my game

New in Buffet Patron Simulator: Realistic Sounds, Inspecting

Drink Dispensers

Adding sounds to the drink dispensers got me to rework the hold interactions. Now it uses the more sane method of checking key presses and releases (previously it just sent interact calls every frame a key was held). Anyways, with that alongside a new “liquid pouring” effect (which is just a moving cylinder), the dispensers are now more satisfying to use.

Placing Food

Placing food also gets a sound. So that not all foods sounded the same, I added a “weight” field to each food that determined the volume at which the sound would be played.

Inspecting Your Food and Drink

I added an inspect scene that’s basically just a copy-and-paste of the food placing scene but stripped down and with the glass present. It’s accessed by pressing i.

Ship Soon?

Next, I will focus on final optimizations and promotional materials (videos, images) to prepare to ship within a few days.

New in Buffet Patron Simulator: Drinks

You can mix drinks and the color of the glass’s contents changes accordingly.

I also added the game’s first sounds - you should be able to hear them in the video - as well as 3 more foods: crab rangoon, General Tso’s chicken, and coconut shrimp.

It was a challenge to get the glass to fill at a consistent rate, but I figured it out using a coroutine that restricts the rate of calls to add liquid (which occur every frame the E key is held). Next up is figuring out how to play a sound while it fills…

Added some scenery and lighting to my buffet game

There are some tough tradeoffs to be made in terms of graphics, given that I want the game to look good but also be lean for the web.

Skybox

There aren’t actually any 3D buildings outside of the windows, it’s just a skybox I got from Polyhaven (a large repository of public domain 3D assets I found). I settled for a lower resolution version since it would have less impact on loading times.

Lights

The lights on the ceiling are baked area lights. The upside of that is a lower runtime cost. The downside is that it ignores moving objects like the player.

Floor

Then, thinking the room looked a little dull, I made a purple and yellow (green?) tile material for the floor. The texture is nice and small at only 128x128 px/156 bytes. I’ve been increasingly mindful of texture sizes as my game grows.

Added eggs, baked beans, and green beans.

I also made some other refinements, including making the displays easier to interact with by making their colliders bigger.

Watch me model the foods: https://lapse.hackclub.com/timelapse/0VTNwczx4ETd

Since last devlog, I added burger ingredients and a settings menu.

Here’s a time lapse of me making the models: https://lapse.hackclub.com/timelapse/OWkasEGkBTYV

It’s also now playable enough that I decided to publish a web demo: https://yhlu.itch.io/buffet-patron-simulator

Since last devlog, there is now:

• a preliminary buffet scene with a first person movable character and interactive food displays
• new 3D models for the plate and the rice, made in Blender

Steak Added

Also made some improvements to placing food.

Modeling Issues

It turns out that colorful textures on voxel models mess up when remeshing. The rice doesn’t have this problem because it’s grayscale.

So I ended up trying sculpting and texture painting in Blender, and it was actually very intuitive. The steak in the video is made completely in Blender.

A Pile of Rice

New scene for placing food on a plate. Currently only rice available.

It’s only now starting to dawn on me that this doesn’t really look like rice.

I am working on making food pile up realistically using mesh deformation. The structural integrity is adjustable for different foods.

Structural integrity is achieved in two ways:

1. Only the bottom vertices are directly mapped onto the surface below; the rest are then moved relative to the bottom vertices.

2. The amount a vertex moves is inversely related to its height.

It could be tuned in terms of realism and optimization, but I’m currently happy with the result.