BaristaVR Dev Update #1

Sep 22, 2021 Ryan McLarty Reading time: ~3 mins

Well the time has finally come, and I’ve begun seriously working on my VR game again (I think I’ve decided on the name BaristaVR; it’s catchy and pretty succinctly describes the game)! Fortunately, opening it back up after ~9 months wasn’t too terrible. I left the game in a pretty good shape to be worked on, and I’ve made some meaningful updates in the last couple weeks.

I’ve made the project public on Github, so if you’d like to keep closer tabs or peek at the code, check it out here!

Changes

My first objective was re-scaling the entirety of the world. The way I had it set up originally, the shapes making up the prefabs were scaled to small fractions of a unit, which led to some bizarre behaviour. I’ve since scaled the prefabs and the world to a more reasonable size (though I kept the baby coffee shop on the counter because I think it’s funny).

A comparison between the old scale and the new scale

I made quite a few changes to the way pouring from one liquid to another is done. I won’t dive too heavily into the details, but I applied a force to the liquid being poured, as well as modifying some of the parameters to make the pouring more realistic. Performance still leaves quite a bit to be desired, but I think an improvement on that front will have to wait until I figure out compute shaders.

Showing off some of the new liquid pouring

I made the (admittedly very simple) addition of an espresso puck chute, which allows the player to dump the espresso grounds from the portafilter and refill from the bean grinder. This is more significant than it may seem, as it’s the first time in the game’s development where there’s a repeatable game loop! Before, once the player had ground the beans and poured the espresso, the portafilter was rendered essentially unusable. Now, the player can dump the used grounds and use the portafilter again. We’re well on our way.

Soon to be followed by a hearty *clunk*

Lastly, I’ve broken quite a bit of ground in implementing an ingredient system. As it stands now, each liquid container stores a list of what ingredients they contain and what amounts, as well as the overall temperature of the liquid. Different liquid sources have different ingredients (milk carton pours milk, portafilter pours hot espresso, etc.). Different liquids can of course mix, adding their amounts of ingredients together, averaging their temperature, and blending their colours! In the near future, this will be used to determine what kind of drink a certain liquid is (and how close it is to how that drink should be).

Near roadmap

I’m going to finalize the details of the ingredient system, and begin working on template drinks and methods to compare them with player-crafted drinks.
- In the future, customers will place randomly generated orders, and will judge the performance of the player based on the ratio of ingredients and temperature of the drink.
The steam wand system needs some love, so I’ll be polishing that up to fully integrate steaming milk.
I’ve been slowly but surely improving the sound design of the game, adding a few sound effects here and there for different interactions. There’s still a lot of work to be done, however, so I’ll be working on that soon. Sounds will go a long way in turning it from a tech demo into a game.

Once I have all the fundamentals in place and reasonably polished, I’ll be releasing v0.5-alpha of the game, which will essentially just be a sandbox preview of the basic gameplay.