Cafe Conundrum

by
Ayden Shaw, Corbin Mercuur, Dylan de Jong, Katleho Machobane and Wikho Doman

Synopsis

Café Conundrum places you in the role of a small business owner navigating the challenges of managing a newly opened café in bustling central Johannesburg, South Africa. This top-down, 3D arcade-style management game keeps players on their toes with fast-paced gameplay and obstacles inspired by the real-world issue of poor government service delivery.

As the owner, you’ll move around your café to handle various tasks: taking customer orders, entering them into the point-of-sales system, preparing drinks, and serving customers—all while managing the unique hurdles that come your way. With its blend of strategy and action, Café Conundrum offers a thought-provoking and engaging experience for players.

Project Brief

For this project, we were assigned group in which were expected to work in for the entirety of this project. We were tasked to design and create a game that tackles a real-world issue.
The issue we chose to address was the government’s poor service delivery and its adverse effects on small business owners. We set out with a goal to highlight these challenges in an engaging and meaningful way through immersive gameplay.

As part of the project requirements, we developed a fully functional demo of the game, which served as a proof of concept. This demo was then used as the foundation for pitching the project to potential investor and showcasing its potential impact and viability.

My Role and Contributions

I took on the role as the team lead, as well as the lead developer, for this project.

For my role as team lead, I took on the responsibility of communicating with the team, setting up meetings, delegating tasks and ensuring the project runs smoothly and on track with the deadlines. I often consulted members of my group to check in with the progress of their work and offered the relevant feedback where necessary. Additionally, I also made an effort to consider the views of everyone involved in the project and keep conflict to a minimum.

In my role as the lead developer, I, alongside my support developer, carefully planned out the codebase and what would be required for our MVP (minimum viable project). This then translated into the development of the individual part of the game.

Technologies Used

Cafe Conundrum was created using the Unity game engine. Additionally, the following software was also used in the production:

Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Blender
3DS Max
Adobe Substance Painter
Visual Studio
DaVinci Resolve

Process Work