Sprinkles

In Sprinkles, chefs build a cake, serve a cake, and serve their opponent by racking up the highest score they can. It's a magical cupcake building game for casual gamers.

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Inspiration

The inspiration has come from games such a Tetris, Robot Unicorn Attack, Candy Crush, to name a few. The vibe of the game is influenced by anime from the likes of Ghibli Studio and also Madhouse, in particular Summer Wars.

Sprinkles

It's a casual Mixed Reality game that uses hand gestures. The player needs to make as many cupcakes as they can within a certain time. Powerups such as magical witches help the player, while enemies such as hungry birds hinder them by stealing the ingredients. The focus is on good vibes, short rounds, with a focus on movement and strategy skill.

How Its Built

It's built in Unity, with the models made with Blender.

Challenges

The biggest challenge by far was understanding how to use hand gestures effectively. We went through many iterations testing various control mechanics.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Having a full demo game loop ready for the competition. It took a lot of work to get the gestures working intuitively and to add animations and effects into the game play.

What We Learned

We've learnt a lot about developing for Mixed Reality. In particular, hand gestures: there are a million and one ways to do the same action, but often, it's the simplest gesture that works the best.

What's next for Sprinkles

Our project is a playable demo, so we want to iterate more until we have a complete level. We have one powerup (our witch) and we need to expand on it through balancing and playtestings. The game displays time and scores in a basic way, so we'd like to determine best UI practices to show numbers in the world in a unique way (as opposed to placing 2D text in a fixed position on the screen), preferably that it feels part of the scene.

Updates

We started the contest with a basic prototype that acted a proof of concept, showing that the gestures worked, the game was fun and that we have something with potential. During the contest we did the following:

  • Updated witch powerup (flying animation, grab activation).
  • Score system
  • Time system
  • Music (produced in house)
  • Push up gesture (cup hand and raise to moves cupcake ingredients up)
  • Many updates to the original grab gesture to make it work intuitively, such as releasing the held item anywhere and snapping it back to the grid on the board.
  • Minimized motion nausea by removing excess floating animations
  • Menu systems with interactive buttons (can be touched and also triggered by pointing)
  • Spawn system with increased piece output without being too crowded to obscure vision
  • Collision system to make sure ingredients avoid each other until it's time to build the cupcake

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this jam. Through it, we were able to focus on specific improvements under controlled stress. It means a lot to us!

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