Fridge Frenzy LDJAM 54

Fridge Frenzy, we had ambitious plans with this one!

What this game ended up being:

• Food is delivered to you via a shopping bag
• When you pick the food up, you get points, but you have to deal with it
• The food can be eaten, stored in the fridge, or trashed
• You can only eat the food if your snackfulness is high enough (or low enough, i think?)
• Food will start to rot over time, when food rots, you lose points
• Throwing good food into the bin will also cost you points.
• Rotted food flashes red and black

Ultimately, you must eat all the food. But you can only eat when you’re hungry and so you must store the food in the fridge in the mean time. (It will rot quicker if left out)

Controls

• Left Click on a piece of food to pick it up. There will be one above the shopping bag on the left at all times
• Press X while holding some food to put it in the bin
• Press SPACE while hilding some food to put it in your belly
• Use WASD while holding some food to move it around on the shelves
• Scroll up and down while the food is in front of the shelf to move up and down shelves (you can’t do this if the food is already forward onto a shelf, you have to move it back)
• Left Click while holding food to place it on the shelf
• You can Left Click on food in the fridge to pick it up again
• If you are NOT holding any food, you can hold right click to rotate the fridge left and right (this is a vestigial feature that serves no purpose… In this version)
• I forgot to add a way for you to quit the game, so you’ll need to get your ALT+F4 fingers ready, or I guess just play it forever.

Technology

• Made with Unreal Engine 5.3.1
• Made wholly with Blueprint
• Platform: Windows only
• Food models come from Quixel
• Three music tracks generated by AIVA.ai, don’t rate the audio.
• Everything else is our own, created during the weekend

What we originally planned:

• 3D tetris-style fridge organisation
• You would rotate the food items, store them on the shelves
• Timed events that were meant to be funny, like your crazy uncle calls and asks you to store a box of organs - you cant get rid of it, but it makes nearby food rot quicker
• We wanted many many more food items, and wanted to include things you wouldnt actually normally put in the fridge; like cereal or shoes
• We half implemented a fridge rotation mechanic (you can still see a part of it if you hold right click while not holding any food)
• We had a menu that would show up on a timer, and you would have to supply the correct ingredients to make a meal
• Eggs would still take up space, but would need to be used/eaten four times to be cleared. Only remaining eggs could go rotten
• We experimented with VR controls
• There was a mechanic where certain foods could be stacked on top of one another and others couldnt.
• We wanted to make this hilarious, it was one of our core design pillars, but it didn’t pan out that way. We just couldn’t find opportunities to add humour during development without adding silly amounts of work.

How it went?

• When we committed to doing the LD again for the first time in over ten years, we decided we weren’t going to stay up for 48 hours straight like we used to. We’d be more efficient, more relaxed. Clean 9 hours of sleep each night. We’d only do the Jam.
• On the first day, we had a brilliant design sesh. We kicked back, had a steak BBQ (we’re Australian and the weather’s beaut).
• We riffed on puns for space, brainstormed different meanings for the words space, and limited. Ultimately, we were literally putting shopping in the fridge while chatting about the theme.
• We designed for around three hours, set up projects and stuff for a couple more hours, then got about five hours of work done.
• On the second day, it was a full 12 hours of alternating between 50 minutes hard focus, ten minutes walking around the back yard brainstorming. Pomo-style
• Near the end of the second day, we went through the design we’d made, and prioritised and cut a ton of stuff. We promised we would work on this a little more in the future, maybe make a VR prototype. Its a cool idea, we think.
• On the third day, one man down (because its a Monday here now and he’s a busy bee) it was less organised and more focused. As I write this, I have been in my office chair for 14 hours. I haven’t eaten since a few minutes after I woke up. I’ve been about an hour from finished for about seven hours. No 50 minute stints and ten minute breaks. Just need to finish this one last thing. Ad infinitum.

A note on Unreal Engine: I have basically no UE experience, this was a testing-the-waters type thing for me. I find the editor app itself to be extremely high quality and rock stable. I left it open for three days straight, and only got one crash towards the end. In both Unity and Godot over the years I regularly get crashes, once every couple of hours typically. The other interesting thing is how nice blueprint is to use, but how slow it is to work in. Maybe an experienced person can whip together a complex blueprint much faster, but I found it to be both extremely pleasant, and like walking through molasses. There’s something about it that tickles my brain just right in the same way that games like Satisfactory do.

Overall, it went really well.