CS174A Final Project: Cook with Mama
Made by Justin Chang(), Jason Chen(404792137), and Jessica Cheng (304973591)
1. Our Project
Help mama cook her delicious meals! This is a Cooking Mama-inspired game, where the player tries their hand at cooking a recipe with different steps. There are different cooking station perspectives, and utilizes two different button inputs from user for cooking activities, which do different things depending on task. At each station the player have a task to complete, and the end goal is to finish all subtasks and create the final plate of food, a delicious beef stew!
The different stations are: 1: Ingredients will slowly fall from the sky, move a basket left 'c' and right 'v' to catch as many as possible 2: Chop vegetables to pieces using the left 'c' and right 'v' keys to position the knife and 'b' to cut. There is a guideline indiciating where to cut and points will be granted based on how accurate the cut is. Press 'y' to move on to the next vegetable after one is done 3. Stir ingredients together with 'c' left and v' right, according to the instructions displayed 4. After finished stirring, calculate score, and show the player the results!
2. Who did What
Justin:
Jason:
I focused almost exclusively on Scene 3: Cutting (or according to the previous description, station 2), which involved modification of obj files created by Jessica. As none of us were experienced enough with 3D modelling to believably create cut slices of the 3D models, I had to look through the files and understand how the vectors corresponded to the final object. I then used various stream editors to modify vectors in the obj files to create the necessary stages of cutting each model.
Afterwards, I used several flag variables to track substages within stage 3, such that we would be able to progress from slice to slice and food to food. I would have liked to add more foods to the cutting, but the obj files were very difficult to work with due to a lack of 3D modeling knowledge. In fact, the modified obj files behaved very inconsistently when imported with Shape_From_File and so precise matrix transformations needed to be applied on a case-by-case basis to make the cuts look believable.
Jessica:
One of advanced optimizations in our proposal was the inclusion of physics-based animation, and in our case, that would be the food falling in our first playable station, the food-catching game. Using my knowledge of acceleration in physics, I made it such that when the food fell, it did so with acceleration (though the acceleration rate was of course slowed such that the player has a chance of actually catching the food). Through this, we could develop a framework which allowed foods of different shapes (and thus different mass and aerodynamics) to fall at slightly different rates.
My role involved a lot of artistic direction. As the only person with prior experience in 3D modelling, I used Autodesk Fusion 360 and Blender to create models of all of the food you see in this game, along with the knives, the pot, and the ladle. I made the food textures and applied them to our custom objects. I also improved upon the aesthetics of the game by creating the title screen and the instruction scene of the game using HTML and JavaScript (both of which I also have the most experience in among the group), which was inserted into and interacted with the WebGL code we had. This optimized and enhanced the product as the UI is significantly improved, giving our product a polished look.
