Food Fight Frenzy（哐哐采购科）
A multiplayer party game to play with friends
Group Project
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01.2025 - 09.2025
Project Brief
Together with a team of 3 students, we designed and developed a 2D multiplayer game featuring a “Collect + Battle” gameplay. The game features a 2v2 battle scheme for 4 friends to play in local parties. To win the game, each team needs to collect various food items in the battle field and deliver them to score and meet the target quota.
To achieve a more various and exciting gameplay, we implemented corresponding special skills for each food item when consumed. The food skills are able to be combined in many ways to benefit character movement, fighting, or even robbing the enemy. We also developed a subtle morale system to sustain the exiting vibe during the gameplay.
Project Info
Context: Group Game Project for Large-scale Game Competition
Category: Indie Game Project
Tools Used: Unity, C#, Figma(Collab Design, Prototyping), PlasticSCM(Version Control), Notion(Collab Working), Adobe Creative Suite
Collaborators: Weiyi Zhang(ME), Peter Xu, Jiansheng Jin
My Role: System programming, game mechanics programming, UI/UX design & development, producer, gameplay experience design, sound design
Project Video
——— Project Development ———
Design
The game's ideation was to rebuild and refine the Culinary Showdown game developed last year in a game elective course at the ETH Game Lab. We refined the gameplay logic to reduce useless gameplay time which will be caused by the original game rule - combat mechanisms are too easy and winning can be quick for one side, so that the player will easily get bored before the game ends.
Core Game Mechanism
We then redesigned the core gameplay mechanism. By using the very single core: "score higher to win", combined with "collecting or using" various food effects, a basic gameplay mechanism is introduced during the early developments.
Food Items & Super Powers
We designed 8 food items with their dedicated superpowers ranging from speeding up, obtaining shield, flying, obtaining a weapon, etc. The superpower choices were prototyped and iterated to provide appropriate and fun power-ups during gameplay, while maintaining the gameplay balance for two sides.
Charatcer Design
We leveraged the similar design pattern in the original Culinary Showdown game with penguins as Frozen team and Salamanders as Hot Team. We also redesigned the character look to enhance their appearance, together with polished animations for various states.
UI Design
We introduced the player controller register menu and the food item selection menu for the UI interaction. The menus are fully functional for player controller register, team swapping, character skin swapping and selecting foods to be used in the gameplay round. We iterated the menu logic and controls based on playtest feedbacks, making sure the menus supply functional and easy-to-use customization features for new players.
Programming & Implementation
For gameplay implementation, we developed core mechanics in Unity(C#) including game system, character control, skill implementation and AI bot behavior trees. The player status and superpower mechanisms are implemented by state machines designed for future improvements. The player mechanics, e.g. movement, power-up handling, aiming, state transition are coded in modular sections with low dependency to avoid bugs like race conditions in edge cases. Additionally, I also implemented 30+ VFX using Shader Graph, and UI in Figma + uGUI framework. We used the PlasticSCM for version control.
PlayTesting & Iterations
We conducted a few in-person playtests with 20+ players, analyzed gameplay feedback and behavior data, and iterated on design and performance to optimize stability and player experience.
2025 Unity China Developer Competition
Future Development
We plan to publish the future version of the game on Steam. We will introduce more features to the game, including:
Special Game Modes (Racing, Chaotic Battle, Single-player Story Mode)
Event Systems during Gameplay
LAN or Online Multi-player Support
Multiple Language Support