CHECKOUT - Devlog #1

For this week, our team has been hard at working setting up a play testing build and gathering feedback from players based on the core scanning/bagging mechanics and the character generation. For Checkout, I’ve been taking a more technical role dealing with programming the primary gameplay mechanics and systems as well as creating visual effects and all audio elements present in the game.

This week, my primary responsibilities dealt with implementing the core mechanics into a playable build in order to gather playtest feedback to be organized into a report. Here is a breakdown of my responsibilities and actions I took during the week:

1. I started off by creating placeholder elements for the main gameplay screen. This included a cashier til with conveyor belt, a bagging area, background art and some food items for players to scan and bag.
2. Import placeholder assets into the Unity project and set up the scene with colliders and rigid bodies.
3. Create scripts for the conveyor belt, the scanner and for the scannable objects.
4. Then, I created a placeholder test spawner that would instantiate a random item above the conveyor belt every X amount of seconds.
5. Finally, I implemented a bit of visual feedback for picking up, scanning and bagging with the use of the DOTween Unity package.

A couple of known issues with the current build was the inconsistency of picking up items with the mouse, particularly with the banana item since the collider for it was banana shaped, causing some weird detection within Unity. Another bug was the visual effects effecting the size of the bag’s colliders as well which causes inconsistencies when bagging items.

Overall, I’d call this week a success with only minor technical setbacks who have did not e affect the overall goals we set out to accomplish. I’m quite happy with the way the project is going so far and actually look forward to continue Checkout’s development!

Stay tuned for more!

-Ron