Purrrfect Pizza

Project / sketch goals

• At a most fundamental layer, exploration of using Wwise within Unity for sound/music control
• Deeper than this, though is: how can we use sound to communicate game-state in a more engaging way?
• Make a "fun" thing

An idea

Roll and writes are an enjoyable game-style, but often you are not entirely sure if you're doing "well" as you are playing. Smaller examples like Yahtzee and Qwixx make it easier to follow (especially with how the scoring sheets are laid out), but more robust examples could benefit from some added illumination¹. Is this what is stopping more complex board-based roll and writes (Dinosaur Island: Rawr 'N Write comes to mind² ) from being more widely-adopted on digital platforms?

In particular, making a game similar to David King's wonderful Tiny Islands feels like an interesting space to be exploring these ideas.

With these things in mind...

Brainstorming

Immediately the idea of laying out pizza toppings (rather than island-town attractions) seems fun. At lunch with the 'lilionaires^TM we start brainstorming what kind of goals/restrictions you could implement.

Compelling Ideas:

• certain foods don't want to be next to others (i.e pineapple³ )
• trying to separate out half/quarter pies for different goals (meat lovers, veggie, dairy-free?)
• spicy/sweet stuff as bonuses
• rotating through quadrants for placement
• a "conveyer-belt" style delivery of ingredients for immediate placement
• the ability to slice after the fact? (more complicated and possibly harder to implement the desired audio, but an interesting game idea)

Onward!

So Purrrfect Pizzas⁴ is born, a digital roll and write where you try to make perfect pizzas to please your picky patrons. It practically makes itself! Except that it doesn't. That's what the next month is for. First step: quick and dirty paper prototypes to get some very rough ideas of the overall loop.

Notes

1 Question: if Yahtzee is so named because it was invented on a boat, then why isn't it Yachtzee? They've taken the C out of a game intended for a yacht (all puns intended)

2 Oddly enough, Dinosaur Island: Rawr 'N Write appears to have a digital companion app to help in the tedious chore of score-keeping, so maybe the argument is moot

3 Calm down

4 I mean, c'mon

The great Mathew Sisson visited this week, and we went through a quick prototype that emerged from some rough sketching. These initial sketches led to a couple ideas of how the game could be laid out and played.

A 5x5 grid would give 60 possible spaces total if one space was added per column for each quarter of the pie (see sketch above). This feels appropriate for eventual development (and maybe even including flexible sizes⁵), but for the initial digital game sketch it seems beneficial to stick to a smaller play area. The smaller size of 3X3 leads to 24 total spaces, which will allow for some experimentation with the sonic parameters (which, after all is the main goal here).

Simple Items/Rules

While it feels natural/obvious to have multiple toppings per card⁶, these early iterations will focus on single ingredients. Additionally, the question arises as to how those items are delivered to the player (and placed, for that matter). For the sake of simplicity, this first iteration will randomly deliver the available ingredients one at a time, and the player will place them accordingly.

The ingredients along with their "rules" and tile quantities were as follows:

• Mushrooms (M) x6 - doesn't want to be near other mushrooms
• Olives (O) x6 - wants to be near other olives
• Pineapple (P) x4 - wants to be near meat, but no other ingredient wants to be near pineapple
• Pepperoni (R) x4 - wants to be near sausage
• Sausage (S) x4 - wants to be near the crust

Takeaways:

• The points awarded were fairly arbitrary (+1 for each olive near another olive, for example) and definitely need to be tweaked in future iterations.
• Equal numbers of items as spaces on the playfield has the potential to make the game function as a solvable problem (especially if all ingredients were available at once rather than one by one). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and could be explored further, but the next iteration will include blank spaces to see how that effects gameplay.
• Perhaps Pineapple has a bell-curve points effect (i.e 1 pineapple = 2 points, 2 pineapples = 5, but more than that and the points reduce?)

Next Stage:

Bringing this rough version into Unity and beginning to work on the Audio

Notes

5 and different shapes and styles! Grandma pie! Detroit style! Freeform! Deep dish!

6 an obvious touchstone here is Circle the Wagons or Matt Sisson's own Strawberry Sunset though there are some really interesting tweaks that could be made here, namely square cards instead of rectangular, and cards in which certain ingredients cover up more than one quadrent (i.e cheese). This brings in the fun possibility of stacking these cards to assemble more pleasing creations and introduces strategy to eliminate negative pairings

First Pass

This initial implementation is fairly rough. There are no sounds yet, but the framework is here for all future sonic tinkering. Additionally, it's not as "gamey" as it will hopefully eventually be, but the bones are here.

• Hover over an open quadrant
• Press a key to place an ingredient there
• See what happens with your points?

Version 1 WebGL Build

Takeaways:

• While trying very hard not to wring hands over the general game design, this feels like a good place to start with the audio experiment.
• The placement of tiles actually feels quite fun and puzzley, as there probably is a "right" solution to the given constraints.
• Manipulating the number and type of toppings available in a given round would be a way to create levels in this design solution

Assets Used:

These will (probably) all be updated in future versions⁷, but for this iteration the project includes:

• Pizza Topping Icons by Xue Ao Zhang
• Display Font: Fredericka the Great - Designed by Tart Workshop
• Body Font: Montserrat - Designed by Julieta Ulanovsky, Sol Matas, Juan Pablo del Peral, Jacques Le Bailly

Notes

7 particularly with interest seeing how Procreate can be used for original asset creation (thanks for the rec Z!

So begins the experimentation into different sonic possibilities.

Initially this was going to be done using Wwise after discussing the options with Dr. Dimitrov⁸, but (numerous tutorials and preparations later) it turns out that Wwise doesn't export on Unity WebGL builds! It seems important to keep this on the web for testing and compatability reasons, so... back to FMOD we go. It will be interesting to see how the ideas that were originally intended for a Wwise-specific mindset get translated into fmod.

The idea behind this first one here is pretty straightforward, namely: as time progresses the restaurant grows louder and more chaotic.

One interesting note about this is that there actually isn't a visible timer for the player, the hope being that we are actually relying on the sound itself to cause stress and/or communicate rising intensity rather than a standard clock.

Sound Experiment 1 WebGL Build

Takeaways:

• This seems fairly successful? Next steps will be to add music that perhaps lives in the world (i.e. sonically similar to arcade music from the pizza joint's "arcade) and also increases in intensity as time progresses
• Obviously this is made with a design-goal of increasing that intensity, which is fun to explore sonically, but may not necessarily be a final goal

Next Stage

The next thing to add is music that increases in intensity with time (as mentioned above) but also should adapt to other paramters as well. One idea is to have the music become more complicated as the pizza becomes more full. This could be tied to "success" (i.e more complex pizza == more complex music) or maybe not. Intensity could then be tied perhaps to the timbral quality of the sound. This could be specially fun with a "pinbally" type of soundtrack where the timbre is more ringy and harsh as time progresses. One problem here is obviously the competing information streams as mentioned in Bukvic's Introduction to Sonification. It will be important to be thoughtful about what information is most important (and pushes the design values) as more sound gets added.

Additionally, as this is a prototype, some on-screen controls to turn on and off certain soundstreams and/or settings may be interesting (á la Hidden Orchestra's Creaksbox).

Assets Used:

• Pinball Arcade Ambiance from EV-Dawg via freesound.org
• cooking, chopping vegetables,boiling.mp3 from giabububaba via freesouond.org
• Washing Dishes from tim.kahn via freesound.org

Notes

8 and finding out that they are a local to Montreal!

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that FMOD is a fun little thing! A workflow done in Ableton Live translates fairly well to the environment, and the thought-process is similar to previous explorations done in Max/MSP (though obviously with an entirely different build process). This similarity lies primarily with the getting, setting, and planning for how various numerical parameter values will effect musical composition, and that part feels great. It will be exciting to start building out these compositions within FMOD, especially when leveraging its effect banks.

The final implementation here feels okay, with the three elements of time, score, and items placed ("progression") effecting various parameters. The main idea is to create a sense of "flow" when things are going right by:

• a) applying an LPF to the restaurant noise, simulating a zone-like state,
• b) increasing the complexity of the overall track as the number of items increase on the pizza
• c) applying glitched/distorted/unpleasant sounds to the music in contrast to the most desirable score at any given moment

Sound Experiment 1 WebGL Build

Takeaways:

• The music isn't necessarily "bad" here from an "interesting music" perspective, but it seems to work?
• This iteration feels fine as far as communicating information to the player, but definitely isn't hitting anyone over the head OR being subtle?
• The combination of visually and sonically communicated "score" is interesting, and it would be worth trying in the future versions that don't tell the player what to do. A scenario like this might be to remove all the instructions and have the player place and move components based on what they hear. There's really a good idea somewhere in there, I think.

Next Stage

Technically this is the end of this stage of the experiment, with the next one being dedicated to Elias, but perhaps that is silly? Initially it made sense as they were positioning themselves as a dedicated solution for music specifically, but this appears to have changed and they are now more of an FMOD/Wwise alternative. Further research is needed!