Francisco Flores - Pupusa Time

Play 'Pupusa Time'!

Pupusa Time is an art game that connects the player to the tradition of making pupusas passed down over thousands of years. Using motion controls, the player will go through different eras of Salvadoran history depicted in traditional artstyle by mastering the steps of the cooking process.

Responsibilities and Experience

Pupusa Time is a collaboration effort of a team of six. Because of having such a small team, each person had to fill in many roles. I was both a programmer and game designer. As programmer, I was responsible for engineering the UI functions and contributed to the implementation of motion controls for our game. As designer, I contributed to designing gameplay flow and UI orientation and behavior. During this 11-week experience, I learned how to effectively collaborate with a team to develop a game.

My main takeaways:

I learned to read, understand, implement, and build upon existing code.
I communicated effectively with others who are responsible for different areas of game development, such as artists and sound designers.
I presented ideas and weekly progress updates to managers and company heads.

The Process

Programming

The idea of the game began with: how do you make a pupusa and how can we represent that in a game whilst exploring its history? We decided our game would best be played with motion controls, as it would give the player a much more interactive experience and more accurately represent making a pupusa. We began our search on how to implement it. The Unity engine alone does not support the gyroscope and accelerometer functionality, so, after some research, we were able to access those functions on a PS4 controller by changing the layout Unity uses to get inputs from the controller. This worked but was very clunky as it needed to be connected with a USB cable at all times in order to work and it did not detect the controller at all outside of the editor when actually building the game. We needed another controller.

After additional research, I was able to implement Joy-Cons as our solution. These were a significant improvement as an alternative to the PS4 controller, giving a more engaging experience to the player while removing the hassle of a wired connection. With that, I scripted a virtual cursor using the Joy-Cons gyroscope to navigate through UI and contributed to using it in our gameplay.

Game and UI Design

Above is an example of a storyboard in which I designed the flow of the game as a foundation for my fellow programmer and I. This gave us a direction in terms of how to begin engineering the game and how the game would progress and evolve as you played.

This is a white-box draft of the main menu UI would look that I put together. It consists of the main menu, level select, gallery, and settings menus.

This is a draft of how the gameplay UI would appear. I felt that the timer aspect was redundant, so it was removed. The words at the top were just for debugging, to show what the current motion was supposed to be.

Final draft of the main menu UI. The buttons are purposely large to be easier to click on with the virtual mouse.

Final draft of gameplay UI. It made more sense to have the scrolling icons to be on the left because in more western cultures, it is normal to read from left to right. The Joy-Con model on the bottom right is to give the player a sense of orientation for their controller.

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