Game Designer
Winner Bakes All
ROLE
Solo Developer
DESCRIPTION
Winner Bakes All is a physics-based puzzle game where the player must bake desserts by dropping ingredients into bowls. The player can move blocks to help get ingredients to bounce into bowls and collect stars for a higher score.
Last one in's a broken egg! Make delicious desserts using less than productive methods. Collect stars to increase your score!
Duration
January 2017 to April 2019
Engine
Zero Engine, Unity
PLATFORM
PC, Android
PC Prototype
Winner Bakes All is a solo project that I created in about two months using DigiPen’s proprietary engine named the Zero Engine. I created all of the systems and content myself, alongside using music and art from DigiPen’s resources. Prop art was created by Maria Becerra.
This game was heavily inspired by Cut the Rope. While Winner Bakes All is a PC game, it was designed to be a prototype for a mobile game. I designed the interactions to be minimal so they could emulate the interactions of mobile games. The UI is designed to imitate button interactions on mobile, but the prototype is tested with text interactions instead of buttons. The mobile version is currently in development. As a UX designer, I tried to focus on polishing the elements of feedback in this project. I tried to focus on the small details, such as when the ingredients bounce, they animate, and their sound effects increase in pitch the more they bounce.
Mobile
Winner Bakes All was in development for Android devices. It was built in the Unity Engine. The controls of the game were changed from the mouse controls of the prototype to touch controls. One of the greatest struggles that came from this is moving the blue blocks. It took a lot of tweaking to get the hit box and sensitivity just right, as well as scaling them up slightly when being moved so that players can see them under their fingers. In the prototype, the blocks would flip when right clicked, but in the mobile version, they flip when tapped.
Game Progress
September 2018
December 2018
A lot of changes have happened since the last update in September! I changed the view from vertical to horizontal to add more space for gameplay, and I’ve added new art and audio, to name a few things I’ve done. All the art was created by me using Photoshop. Most assets are original, but others are edited using commercial-use photos. The music was created using Jukedeck, and the sound effects were taken from commercial-use sound libraries. The game now has 10 levels you can bake cakes or cookies in! There’s a lot of changes I still want to make to the game, particularly with its physics and sound design.
In order to leave players more space for gameplay, I placed all that the players would need to interact with on the left side of the screen. This makes the ‘centre’ of the game offset to the right. Placing the pause screen or the score screen at (0, 0) was jarring to players because they thought of the ‘centre’ of the screen as the centre of gamplay, so I aligned anything the players needed to read with the frame of gameplay to the right.