Sugar Bloom Bakery - Spectacles AR
Sugar Bloom is out!
Hey all! Sugar Bloom is live on Spectacles if you have a pair. https://www.spectacles.com/lens/22c920589dcc4c1fbec0665b4c61086b
It's a bakery you set up on your own kitchen table. Cake layers and cupcakes come out of the pantry, you pipe icing with a pinch, you fill orders for customers, and then they tell you exactly what they thought of your work. There's a Free Play mode too if you'd rather skip the orders and just make something, where everything is unlocked and the frosting works as glue so you can stack parts however you like.
Sixty-three rounds of notes to get here. Let me tell you about a few of them.
The toppings got weird, and I could not be happier about it
The second row of toppings unlocks as you work your way through shifts, and it gave me an excuse to build five things that have no business being on a cake.
There's a hummingbird! It doesn't just sit there either. The wings loop, it hovers, and it darts around the way a real one actually moves. It might be my favorite thing in the whole game.
There's a volcano that erupts. There's a black hole, which is a black disc with dust orbiting into it, and it will genuinely pull the sprinkles off your cake if you set it down next to them. There's a rocket that launches a whole fireworks show. And there's a bubble wand that blows see-through iridescent bubbles with the shine baked right into them.
That's the thing about a cake. It's a small enough object that you can put absolutely anything on it and the game just says yes.
The five star problem
Here's a good one. Five stars was too hard to get. I'd decorate something I was actually proud of and walk away with four, and that was bugging me.
So I went looking for a difficulty dial to turn, and I found something much better. Way back I mothballed the old spreading mechanic, and coverage was still being scored against it! Every single cake order was quietly getting docked for a thing the game doesn't even do anymore. Nothing to do with tolerances at all.
That's fixed now. Stray dabs get ignored as long as your real strokes outnumber them, so ten little lavender dots won't wreck your rating. The border band is wider, because borders were scoring zero on cakes where I'd clearly piped a border. And your receipt tells you the frosting depth now, so you're not guessing at what the customer wanted.
I did keep the hard line though. Five stars still needs 0.96. It should be gettable, but you have to be trying.
The thing I deleted to get here
The very last thing I did before shipping was cut a feature I'd spent seven rounds on, and honestly that's the whole reason this is out today.
I wanted a soft dark gradient around the edge of your view, so the display doesn't just stop at a hard rectangle. Simple, right?
It was not simple. The first version looked great on device, but it showed up in my video recordings as a floating black square, which is worse than having no vignette at all. So I moved it onto its own overlay layer that recordings don't capture. That worked! But then it stopped reaching the edges and I could see a gap. Tried sizing it to the camera that actually draws it. Still a gap. Built a screen-space version anchored to the whole display, which by construction cannot have a gap, and that one crashed the Lens on launch with absolutely nothing in the log.
Then it wouldn't open at all. Two builds crashed and two worked, and the difference turned out to be device properties on the overlay camera. Switched those back on. Then I worked out that the gap had been per eye parallax the entire time, so I pushed the quad from 60 cm out to 250 cm.
And it still wasn't quite to the edges. So I cut it. Script, material, render target, the whole thing.
Which I feel completely fine about! It was polish on top of polish, and not one person who plays this is ever going to know that feature existed. If you're sitting on something similar right now, my two cents is cut it and go.
Go make me a cake
Seriously, go play it and then tell me what you think. I want to hear what's fun, what's fiddly, what you wish was in there. That's how every good thing in this game got in, and I'd love to keep that going.
https://www.spectacles.com/lens/22c920589dcc4c1fbec0665b4c61086b
Talk soon!
