This took less time than expected…
Well I am back, with an unexpected update…
After briefly playtesting my game to see the current stage it’s in I realized that apart from the lack of sprites which I mean to start working on today, as well as the lack of depth for the customer mechanics, I thought that the rhythm part, so the actual baking part of this game was quite stale.
Sure, I had made a pretty neat rhythm minigame that resembled guitar hero and synced everything up, making it very easy as well as very accurate, but doing the same minigame over and over again, with the same map got very boring. So to cure this boredom of mine, I decided to dedicate the whole day to making another rhythm minigame!
I was planning on doing this either way, but I expected it to come way later than this. I do plan on making at least one more, which will be a dumbed down version of the initial game, instead having only two buttons, and alternating between the two while staying on beat.
It’s very similar to a game I love very much: Rhythm Doctor. The idea is that the game gives you a beat “n”, and you have to count the amount of beats until that specific one. Once it reaches beat number n, you press spacebar and the minigame ends. This minigame will be used for placing your item in the oven, since it’s similar to a timing mechanic of waiting to do a single action, in this case: taking out the item from the oven. Depending on how close you were to that beat, you get a multiplier instead of a score.
(If you want my reasoning on why a multiplier and not a score, it’s because this minigame works differently, there are no multiple notes to press, there is only a single beat, and everything relies on that, so having a score will almost always result in some kind of hardcoding unless you do something extremely convoluted.
Since we have a score and a multiplier for it, the rhythm game will update the player’s item in two different ways - initially it was one, since I didn’t implement a multiplier - after sending a signal to switch back to the bakery game: if the signal has an amount of notes that is zero or more, the score will increase by adding the minigame’s score, and the amount of notes will be stored in addition to the amount that was already existing. If the amount is “-1”, then the item will instead be multiplied by that value, and the note amount will be ignored.
Finally, to decide on the final quality of the item and thus its price, I have devised a formula, that multiplies the amount of notes by the score you get upon hitting a “perfect” note. This computes a “perfect” score. After that I multiply it by certain values, such as 0.8, to get a certain percentage out of it. Then we check where the item’s score stands among those different thresholds, and we compute the value there. That way, the multiplier is actually useful, but also dangerous: If the score was not perfect, and wouldn’t get the highest amount of money by its own, the multiplier might help, increasing it by quite a bit. However, if you do well on the other minigames, but not on this one your score might not be as good. This simulates how the oven’s timing is a very important part of baking.)
This first one has perfect timing, giving me that sweet multiplier of 1.2 to my score. There is also a “good” score that triggers when your timing is good, but not quite there yet, its multiplier is 1.
Here, I press the spacebar way too early, resulting in a miss. It multiplies your score by a value lower than 1, so that your score decreases from failing that minigame.