Cook the WORLD'S BEST casserole to win the competition and adopt the comic books you ever wanted. A fun puzzle solving game that pieces together the best recipe.
A game maker game that combines narratives with a fun collect/craft-recipes mechanism. Our idea comes from a cooking game that requires the correct combination of ingredients. Instead of having a failure message being displayed for distinctive combinations, I wanted to explore the chances of designing unique recipes. The clues provided in the game hinted at the perfect recipe, but the players are allowed to create their own — received with mixed results.
SHOWCASE
Branching
The narrative system offers many unanticipated twists in a tone of black humor to comply with the game's overall aesthetics. You might end up annoyed by a weird ending that only far-fetchedly makes sense—like the first choice, which leads directly to the end. We made our narrative boxes from Sketch to blend them well with other system UIs.
Mini Games
We include many mini-games for players to collect corresponding ingredients. Although they are easy and often self-explanatory, we hope to add some additional gameplay to the game's progression and prevent the players from quickly listing ingredients for cooking, which is not encouraged because they won't reach the perfect ending(by which i mean winning the favor from the NPCs), ignoring the clues.
End
There are seven endings based on the player's final selection of ingredients; they'll need to report back to the NPCs and face their judgment from there. As we include many unconventional casserole ingredient choices, such as cookies and apples, many endings are written so that they correspond to the strange ingredients being ended. The players could have fun creating whatever casseroles they prefer and explore the endings freely.
Inventory UI
The inventory UI is a vital part of the game as it guides the player and decides the game's ending. Ingredients automatically show up once the players collect them in the game, but the player could reconsider their selection and decide on the ingredients before they move on to cooking. The inventory allows the players to keep track of their progress on collecting, but it doesn't hint at what needs to be added, which creates some challenges.
Game play
The game play is essentially a puzzle solving game, but a combination of small games as well, for example, the player has to complete certain tasks to retrieve their desired ingredients. The players are directed to follow the instructions at the start of the game so then they can learn the mechanism of the game through the conversation. If they choose to diverge and do something else, they are eventually led back to the designed path as the game could not proceed with proper instructions. The next step is to collect as many ingredients as possible: there’s no time limit set to it so that the player is allowed to explore the map freely before they decide to make a go at making the casserole. The final scene is triggered as soon as the player decides the ingredients to use.
Narrative
I use humorous language in the game to create a casual and hilarious narrative style. The whole idea of creating the best casserole for comic books is absurd to begin with, therefore the narratives, along with different choices provided to the player are witty and funny. I also aim to provide hidden clues throughout the conversations between the players and the NPCs so that those who wish to pursue the perfect recipe could get a satisfactory result. Our gameplay could not stand on its own without proper background knowledge, we built the narrative to combine different sections of the games together.
Challenges and improvements
I enjoyed making this game as I embedded interesting twists and turns into the narrative and gameplay. However, the game itself is not as challenging as I see fit as the mini games incorporated are straightforward and easy to follow. Again, the replayability is low as the players could easily get tired after a few rounds. This game is transformable in the sense that the player could be cooking different dishes to serve various purposes: and the landscope/map could be procedurally generated so that the players wouldn't get bored with repetitive processes like picking apples.
