Here is a look at my first game, Vortelli’s Pizza. Run a pizza shop on your own or with a team. Your store grows busier each day. Make sure you serve your customers quickly and their orders must be correct.
You can play it here: https://poki.com/en/g/vortellis-pizza
Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions or encounter any bugs.
It’s brilliant! It’s so fun to play 
and I think it has a lot of potential.
One thing I noticed is that nothing prevents you from preparing the pizzas in between days. So in practice you could bake a bunch of pizzas completely, then start a new day and just serve the pizzas to the clients.
I came up with a couple of ideas that might help with this:
Another suggestion would be to introduce some chaos events to the game. Something like ovens failing, machines breaking, sauce spilling and having to deal with it. That kind of stuff really puts teamplay to the test. This events could be fired randomly or maybe a “skills system” could be implemented.
I’m not quite sure about aesthetics. I think it has a well defined style and it holds toghether as one piece, which is good. But I think it could still benefit from some texturing and lighting while staying in the same style.
I hope this helps! I really enjoyed playing Vortelli’s!
Cheers!
Thank you so much for taking the time to play it! I really like the idea of random chaotic events like machines breaking, spills and fires. I’ll definitely be working on improving the lighting and textures over time. For this version, I wanted to make sure the game could perform well enough even on low end devices. Fun fact, this build is only 2.3MB on the first page load. The peak number of draw calls is ~170 and the game is playable even on an 8 year old iPhone 5s.
I haven’t decided what to do about the gameplay between days. Some early testers reached days 20+ and wanted the ability to prep pizzas before each day starts (like a real kitchen) which is how I arrivated at the current version. But as you’ve pointed out, this eliminates much of the challenge, especially in the early game. You’ve provided some great suggestions, especially the “night time,” idea which I might explore further. Thank you, again!
Maybe there can be an expire date/time so they can’t just load pizzas?
Yes I can see its very fluid, congrats! Are you using textures atlases and/or batching?
Those two things drastically reduce batch calls a lot in many cases.
Ah, I see… so the ability to store ready pizza is a feature then.
However there are 10 to 12 different places to lay down ready pizza… feels like a lot to start with.
Maybe the game should start off with just 4 of this slots and further slots would need to be purchased along the gameplay (in the same way ovens are purchased). That way players don’t have the upper hand at the early stages of the game, but you can build up to it if you get enough credits (and players can base their strategy on this feat if they feel like it)
Cheers!
For the map geometry, almost everything is batched. Many of the models use the same material which allows for very simple batching. Models with animations such as the ovens and mixers aren’t batched. Much of the UI isn’t batched either. I found UI batching very tricky especially with multiple layers and transparency. This is something that I’ll need to revisit.
I like your idea of locking all but 4 prep areas. This would also let the players upgrade their kitchen in a way that suits their play style.
I’m not using Node.js. I’ve written my own multiplayer server in C++ using uWebSockets. I found this series by Gabriel Gambetta to be extremely useful (and inspiring) to build a multiplayer server from the ground up. The series is language agnostic, so you could use it to build a similar server for Node.js if you wanted to.
PlayCanvas also has a Real Time Multiplayer tutorial which is an excellent starting point.
After some revisions and incorporating feedback from the PlayCanvas community, Vortelli’s is now in soft launch in a few regions on the web game portal, Poki. It’s currently playable at these domains:
Brazil: https://www.poki.com.br/g/vortellis-pizza
France: https://poki.com/fr/g/vortellis-pizza
Italy: https://poki.it/g/vortellis-pizza
Sweden: https://poki.se/spela/vortellis-pizza.html
Turkey: https://poki.com/tr/g/vortellis-pizza
If anyone has any questions about publishing PlayCanvas games on Poki, I’m happy to answer them!
The game is amazing and has a lot of potential, I’m looking forward to being able to download it soon.
Thanks for the kind feedback! Vortelli’s will be playable via the web on Poki.com for the forseeable future. At this point, there are no plans for a downloadable version, maybe one day.
Hello Devortel! My friends and I love your game “Vortelli’s Pizza”. We are writing to give you feedback and to thank you for the great nights spent on your video game. I start by telling you that we really appreciated the graphic style and the simplicity in the movement and in juggling the various tasks to be performed. However, we have found some gaps that I am here to list to allow you to improve your game and our nights.
1 Can’t make it through Day 20
2. It is not possible to make pizzas without tomatoes and with more than one ingredient on top
3.Too few ways to spend the money
and last and not least … as true Italians that we are Hawaiian pizza is a sacrilege: D
I hope you improve it maybe by adding the hamburger or hot dog version. It would be a lot of fun. Having said that I hope I have been helpful and motivated to improve the game.
P.S: Keep us updated on twitter if you start updating it
Hi @Lorenzo_Lorefice
Thank you so much for playing. I’m very pleased to hear that you’ve had many great nights playing Vortelli’s. I’m working on an update that will be out in the next couple of weeks. I have some questions for you:
Thank you again for your feedback!
Hello Devortel We’ve come up with a number of ideas for improving your game,
First of all, I would add the ability to take cheese out of some pizzas so that you have more variety of orders.
Personally, we noticed that once you lose, it’s annoying to start the days from zero, so I would structure the game according to.
selectable levels (day 1/ day 2 … exc) or arranged in weeks, if you make too many errors the level starts again, while if you pass the level you unlock the next.
more u go on the ingredients more increase both the speed and the number of orders, both ingredients and the difficulty of making pizza
Ingredients to add according to us: onion, olives and mushrooms always to create more variety of pizzas, MIX THEM!
if you don’t like the idea of separate layers you could insert
a computer to buy ingredients during the days as they end.
Hello, I like your game very much. I have made various multiplayer games over unity for about 1 year and used almost all network systems. Now that I want to make web games, I decided to learn playcanvas, I have a few questions I want to ask you, how long did it take you to make this game and how long do you think it will take to reach this level? Since you don’t know what level I am, my question was a bit silly, you can answer it yourself. Thank you so much.
Thanks! Glad you like the game. I’ve never used Unity but if you’ve been working with multiplayer games/networking for 1+ year you’re off to an excellent start. You can repurpose what you’ve already learned and you can save a lot of time/effort.
It took me a little over one year of on and off work to build Vortelli’s. The part that took me the longest was figuring out how to accurately synchronize the game state between the clients and the servers. The biggest challenge for me was dealing with clients having varying pings, browsers with high and low frame rates as well as the unpredictable packet loss between the server and clients. In fact, I’m still improving my netcode, movement is still not as smooth as I’d like it to be.
Hi! Me and my friends enjoy playing this game very much, and we have some suggestions:
Thank you so much for playing! There are more clothing items in the works. I really like the idea of moving about the street and having other useful shops and things to do around the town. I’m setting up a Vortelli’s Discord to track everyone’s suggestions too. There will be a new update sometime in the next week or so. I appreciate your wonderful suggestions, thank you!
Hello,@Devortel, Congratulations on the success of the game. ¿How much can you win (in dollars) approximately for a game like Vortelli’s Pizza? I want to dedicate 6 months to the development of a game to present in Poki.
POSDATA: Can I include your game on my website?
Tricky question. It depends on so many things. Your game needs to have a decent player retention to get onto the front page of Poki. Without being on the front page of Poki, Vortelli’s likely would have only received a fraction of the traffic. Your game’s earnings also depend on how heavily it’s monetized. The more video ads, the higher it’ll earn. However if it’s not done correctly, this will hurt player retention. Ad rates vary wildly from country to country, for example, traffic from the US and Canada earns sigificantly more than Brazil or Turkey.
Poki has a lot of useful resources covering monetization and best practices, you can read more here.
Edit: Sorry, Vortelli’s Pizza cannot be embedded on your website. My agreement with Poki only allows it to be shared on Poki’s websites.
It is understood. And thank you for your answer. I will try some of my games, to see what happens. Greetings Nacho 