The Food Court

Last week, the graphics team continued remodeling Food Fight. In order to create diverse and distinct levels, we decided to develop each based on differing, but recognizable food/dining facilities. The first that we are focusing our efforts on is a mall food court. Since food courts most often provide an array of dining choices, we split up to work a few different restaurants, including a smoothie shop and a Japanese style restaurant. The restaurants needed to look real enough and yet have distinctive differences between them. The colors we chose, down to the detailed objects we put into the restaurants, need to give a cohesive feel to the restaurant and to the new environment as a whole. The unique challenge to this was to make each one different from the rest even though they might have some of the same types of things in them. If, for example, the light fixtures are the same, then how do we make them unique to the individual restaurant? Going forward, that is what we had to keep in mind and really push to make the food court a variety of interesting things for the player to look at.

Smoothee Shak

Inspired by the typical smoothie shop, Smoothee Shak is designed to sell an assortment of calorie-packed frozen fruit beverages. Shown modeled in Maya, it features a serving counter, sneeze guards, blenders, refrigerators, a prep counter, a hanging menu, and a lit three-dimensional sign logo. Each of the three restaurants will feature its own unique color scheme, with the Smoothee Shak being bright orange, pink, and lime green. Most real-world smoothie shops tend to have very smooth and fluid interior designs, so that commonality was kept in mind here when modeling the rounded pillars and the curved serving counter. Most of the structure’s materials will consist of vinyl paneling, wood paneling, and tile, while the appliances, signs, etc. will also include glass, stainless steel, and various types of plastics. It will also be fun to create an emissive texture for the Smoothee Shak logo so it has the proper feel of a back-lit store sign.

Big Ramen

Big Ramen is inspired by Japanese food options at food courts. We already had some existing objects that had a Japanese inspiration, so we took those and edited them for the environment.  We also had to make the layout different and distinctive from each other. The Ramen shop will be clean stained dark woods with colors of some green.  The sign on top needed to be unique and still look like a restaurant logo, which is why we made the font different and slanted. We wanted the Ramen shop to be really clean and solid looking. Most Japanese restaurants are peaceful feelings with koi ponds in the waiting room or beautifully-detailed architecture outside to bring the feel of Asian culture to their restaurants. We wanted to do that same thing with our Ramen Shop here, so we added a plant and fixed a tiny Japanese-inspired sculpture. This is all to give it that feel of Japanese inspiration.

Moving forward, most of these objects still need to be fully UV-ed and textured in Substance Painter before being imported into Unity. Designing the color and material palettes in Substance will help distinguish each of these restaurants within the food court while adding varying amounts of color to the scene and divide up the space of the entire level environment. Keeping these new restaurants in mind, it will also be important that we bring in some new food models that fit the scene well and match the themes of each, such as various fruits and smoothie cups for Smoothee Shak as well as noodles and meat for Big Ramen.

You can read more about Food Fight on the game website, or download the game for free on the Oculus store.