Ruben's Ramen Restaurant

StartScreen
FrontofRestaurant
KitchenAssets
RoryNPC
VioletNPC

Inspiration

We both like ramen

What it does

Ruben is your friendly neighborhood ramen-man! He runs the restaurant by himself and therefore must understand his customers and accurately memorize their orders. As Ruben, you will talk to townsfolk, get to know them, make delicious ramen with the perfect proportions and the right ingredients, then see how your restaurant fares.

How we built it

We built RRR using Unity Game Engine, and scripted the gameplay using C#. We also looked into the game design process and used the agile development strategy to quickly iterate through ideas and concepts in order to try and get through as many milestones as possible. The pixel art was either free use from sites like itch.io, or drawn by hand on Piskel.

Challenges we ran into

We hit a wall during development that required a lot of time-consuming debugging. Aside from technical challenges that arose as a result of development, the time-cruched hackathon format forced us to get rid of our original idea of a tea shop with a bigger cast of NPCs. On the design side of things, we had trouble standardizing the world of pixel we were trying to build, for example, how do we make NPCs look like they are from the same game?

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The dialogue system took a lot of time to implement, so we are very proud of it. We are also happy with the kitchen design, all drawn by hand, and the flow of the game. Our most favorite is the sad and monster ramen screens that pop up when the player either adds too little or too many ingredients.

What we learned

We learned how to be flexible, communicate our ideas and frustrations, and picked up pixel art in less than two days.

What's next for Ruben's Ramen Restaurant

As this is only the first iteration, RRR is missing a few key gameplay aspects. As of now, the game only features two NPCs. A good part of the art is not standardized throughout the game, so that would also be something to work on. The kitchen scene needs a timer aspect for the ramen cooking and some sort of additional gameplay for the soup part (perhaps stirring). It would also be nice to implement a chopping gameplay for the toppings.