Bread to Dough

Game Start, Empty Field
Menu Screen
Midgame, 2/5 Prestige Done
EndGame (Tachyon Factory)

Try it out

Link to project build website: link

Inspiration

We were inspired by two very distinct games, Egg Inc. and Hay Day. The inspiration from Egg. Inc was a prestige system that was implemented in our game. In both our game and Egg Inc., when a prestige occurs a new egg, or in our case bread, is available. Additionally, we added an extra feature of introducing a new farm and material that is used to create the bread. The inspiration for the tile system and the idea of implementing pens like cows and eggs came from Hay Day. However, an extra feature that we added is various factories that produce different types of bread.

What it does

Our project is a bread tycoon, in which the player farms a variety of resources such as wheat, milk, eggs, and bread. To make bread, the player must first farm milk, eggs, and wheat, then the player needs to make a bread factory that automatically makes bread with its ingredients. After the player makes a set amount of bread, the player can prestige, or restart their progression in the game in order to unlock more tiers of breads/resources. Our tiers were regular bread, shiny bread, solar bread, cosmic bread, and tachyon bread, with each of these tiers coming with their own bread factory and an extra resource to farm. The end goal in this game is to get past the tachyon prestige, and “ascend” to the heavens like the bread god.

How we built it

To create Bread To Dough, we utilized many resources, the most prominent of which were the Unity game engine, the Photopea online photo editor, the Kenney.nl website, and the C# coding language in Microsoft Visual Studio. We first began by developing the core building system and the game loop of prestiging and building your bread empire. Then, we developed the functions of the buildings, the currency systems, the selling system, and the cutscene system. At this point, the game was basically complete, so we focused our time on hand-creating high quality assets for the game, and animating them using the Unity game engine. Overall, we are very pleased with the consistent aesthetic style present throughout our game, and are happy we resorted to our own artistic skills rather than online resources.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge we faced was developing an idea and topic for the game. The theme of food was much more minimalistic than we were expecting, which made the ideation process particularly difficult. Since the topic of food was very broad, we had to spend a longer amount of time brainstorming ideas and developing a thorough plan for moving forward. However, a benefit of doing this was, during the game development process we always had a plan to stick to which would keep us on track and allow us to allocate our time accordingly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The segment of Bread To Dough that we take the most pride in is the hand-drawn assets and cutscenes. In bread To Dough, instead of making the game have an infinite progression, we wanted to provide players with a storyline. To convey the story, we chose small animated cutscene slideshows as our media. We enjoyed creating the story behind each prestige and bread type very much, and we are very proud of the developed narrative that is ingrained within the gameplay of Bread To Dough. These cutscenes are made entirely of sprites drawn by our team in Photopea due to the fact that we wanted to maintain a consistent art style. Overall, we are extremely happy with the way all the assets turned out, and the way everything is animated.

What we learned

This project was our third time collaborating to create a project. The first time we collaborated at the Academies Hackathon of 2023, we were very unorganized and barely managed to get our game submitted on time. This time, however, we managed to allocate our time towards the respective mechanics and resources we decided to develop for the game based on our individual strengths and weaknesses. We learned that this way of working was much more efficient than that of the previous two competitions, as we were able to finish the game with plenty of time remaining for polish and submission.

What's next for Bread to Dough

The next step for Bread to Dough is adding more prestige levels available, because we are currently only offering 5 prestige levels. Additionally, when the final prestige level is reached, we want to provide an opportunity to reset everything, however the user is given ascension points, which can be used to buy power buffs that will make game play much easier and more fun. These ascension points could also be used to buy more farms and types of breads which would sell for a much higher price than previous breads. Also, we would like to make the game loop longer, since the current version of game is meant to be finished within the hour for the sake of the judges of the competition.