Why I Pivoted from Shooter to Cozy Game

Although at first a shooter and a cooking game may not have a lot of similarities, it would turn out that a cozy baking game shares a lot of the same mechanics as my third-person shooter.

Before we started producing our game for the final project, I was working solo to create a new game. I spent the first two weeks creating a new fighting game: zombie-smack. This game would be a zombie survival game where waves of zombies would come and attempt to harm the player. The player would be able to pick up rocks, and different types of sticks.

When we began creating our projects, I wanted to first see what I could reuse for my project to spend up development for the first playtest in 3 days. I wanted to make sure that I had a working prototype as soon as possible because my previous game development experience taught me that it takes a long time to make new code and how one error can break your game for days.

I immediately got to work redesigning my zombie-smack which was already a redesign of sharpshooter into Whisker. I borrowed the player mechanics: the player movement script was all good, but especially the throwing mechanic. This script allowed me to have my player be able to pick-up ingredients and throw them into different things. I readadjusted the code to make it so that the ingredient wouldn't fly so far away.

I changed the enemies to customers and by doing this I was able to get the player to pick-up an ingredient, make some sort of food with it, and serve it to a customer.

Sharpshooter

Zombie Smack

Whisker