Project Holobox

What is this project about?

Project Holobox is a Unity game made for the Holobox at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. It is a cooking game where the player will experience stress when he is failing orders. The player is advised to ask for help when things aren't going well, you can then play the game with multiple people. This game was made to test the limits of the Holobox & to advise students to ask for help if things aren't going well.

Project date: From February 2024 - May 2024

Project duration: 2 1/2 months.

Development Team: 3 developers & 4 artists

Engine: Unity

Programming language: C#

You can watch the video below to see the gameplay.

My role & contribution in this project.

I was a programmer for this project, my role was to create mechanics for our game. I made the customer AI, cutting mechanic, restaurant and the trash can.

The order card, this shows what the customer wants & which ingredients you need to make it.

When the game begins the customer will choose a order out of a menu list that I created in another script. The customer will choose randomly which order he'd want to have, I made it so that when the game begins the order is equal to the restaurant menu list. Then it will choose between 0 being the first item on that list, to the last item on that list which is the restaurant menu list length.

This is the restaurant menu list.

This here is the restaurant menu list, from here the customer will choose a random order that the player will then have to make.

This is the trash can, where you can get rid of ingredients.

If you picked up the wrong ingredient you can throw it away in the trash can, for example when you burn the wrong ingredient. The code here below shows how it works, when you drag an ingredient or object to the trash can it will check if the oject is an ingredient. For example dragging rice to the trash can will destroy the rice since it's an ingredient, but if you drag the knife to the trash can it won't be destroyed since it's not an ingredient.

This is the knife you use to cut the ingredients

This is the knife you use in the game, the green box you see around it is the collider detector. With that green box it can check if an object is an ingredient that can be cut, such as the bok choy and the mushrooms

The code below here shows how it works, when you drag the knife and slash the bok choy for example. The ingredient cut amounts will go up by 1, the cut amounts is how many cuts the ingredient need to be cut where it will then change in a cut version of the bok choy.

Retrospective

This was a very fun and interesting project, we did have some setbacks but we managed to display a beautiful project at HvA. One of our major setbacks was that the Holobox's touch screen didn't work, so we couldn't play our game on it. So we then decided to display & play it on the screen next to it, where the touch screen did work.

It was fun to make a project in Unity again after a long while, although I had to quickly remember how to work in C# again. I've also learned that when making a new C# code for something that I should always make a new script for it, since I always tried to do it in the same script. But a colleague of mine said to me to always do it in a new script, because a script always have to have 1 main purpose.

Not that it takes care of the customerAI, cutting of the knife & the cooking of bacon for example. So I'll definitely keep my eye out more to follow this, since I don't do this most times. I can't wait to make more amazing projects like this in the future of my career!