Team Size: 13
Timeframe: 4 months
Sprint Timeframe: 6 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor
Key Contributions: i5-7 (cut your pepper, set your timer, eat your quesadilla)
Learning Prompt: How does a quesadilla get made? (encourage Nutrition)
Date Sprint Completed: November 2022
Welcome to a new cooking series with Molly and Spats! In this inaugural episode of School of Yum, we will be making a “pepper upper black bean” quesadilla with black beans, cheese, spices, and your choice of pepper. Once we’re done, Spats will try our dish and tell us what he thinks.
School of Yum (SOY) is meant to teach certain cooking skills with a series of innovative interactions whilst also encouraging nutritional aspects of diet. Pre-production involves full-on live film shoots of the cooking materials and ingredients before being transferred to animation and the interactive editors.
I worked on this first episode in October-November 2022 over a 6-week timeframe, in charge of the back half of the experience in which you choose and cut your peppers, set a cooking timer for your toaster oven for 3 minutes, and then get to eat your quesadilla.
The most extensive of these interactions was the cutting interaction (i5B), that utilized a series of trace logics. The key part of it is that the highlight on the trace icon and the highlight on the trace line are programmatically separate, so a tracking variable has to gauge whether or not the player has reached 50% completion to determine if the trace line highlight starts from the top or halfway down, so that it appears the highlight transition is seamless.
The timer interaction (i6) showcased the ability of masking over one object with another, interactively, and otherwise simply linked the timer dial to the player’s rotation.
The eating interaction (i7) also had a precise bit of complexity, in that it was designed for small food particles to emit out of the player’s touch position, and this required designing five different sets of particles to emit so that repeat tapping wouldn’t move the set of the particles mid-emission.
It seems that Spats enjoyed the quesadilla. We look forward to more episodes and more cooking experiences to come!
Matthew Floyd 