Cooking the Perfect Game
Game design comes into its own when a team works together to bring a player's experience to life. In that spirit I often find myself working with a good friend and peer, Mike Salyh (Check him out here). Together we've worked on countless projects, below is the recount of one, How to Cook Everything. Enjoy!
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Mike and I have always been fond of Game Jams, events that pit a small team of game designers against a goal: to create a game that fits some criteria in a highly limited amount of time (usually a weekend). After moving to Los Angeles we have made it tradition to compete in the Global Game Jam, hosted at University of Southern California every year no matter how busy we may be.
Our first Global Game Jam found us working with new friends and proved to be a platform on which we could test some of our zanier ideas. The theme of the Jam that year was: What do we do now? and they asked that you allow for multiple players as well as incorporate the audience in some way. Not the smallest task for 48 hours.
Our team was comprised of Mike, and myself, as well as one of Mike's peers, Pierce McBride, a fellow game designer.
The first night we discussed back and fourth all the different conceits we could imagine, all the wonky mechanics we could dream up, and (very briefly) how viable these were to complete in the remaining time. Everything from battlefield simulators to planet building games were discussed...
"We're not getting anywhere" Mike said "Everyone is doing something something battlefield".
He wasn't wrong. In our struggle to find the perfect idea we'd done a couple laps to check in on other teams. There were quite a few interesting ideas but quite a few battlefield simulators as well...
"What about a cooking game?" Pierce proposed.
"Well I certainly haven't seen that here" I responded. It was a goofy idea but it could work.
"The only thing is cooking games are so commonplace these days" Mike remarked. "We have to find a way to make the player feel like they're actually a chef."
"Wait yeah!" I said, an idea brewing. "What if the game occupied physical space, like a real restaurant, so we could get the players to move around and get that bustling-kitchen vibe."
Mike understood immediately "We could have a couple different computers each running their own cooking related task and network them together to create a continuous game played over several devices!"
And so How to Cook Everything was born. We set aside three tables in a "C" shape to simulate the kitchen space as best we could and set to work building.
36 hours, 2 pizzas, and a hell of a lot of frustration later we were finished.
When the dust settled it spanned 5 separate devices and was playable by two "Chefs":
- A touch screen tablet where the audience (or queue waiting to play the game) could place their order.
- A selection station where the two player-chefs could choose the ingredients to make their delicacies.
- A chopping station where the chefs would slice, dice, and chop the ingredients.
- A cooking station where the chefs could choose to toast, boil, or fry the meal.
- And finally, a garnishing station where the chef could try to save some face by covering their meal in toppings.
We wanted the game to feel busy always, like a normal kitchen, so it became about resource management. The orders would start to pile up, your partner would be stuck chopping up ingredients, and is that the Caesar salad I smell burning? Why did you put that in the toaster to begin with?
To fit the theme we leaned into the silliness that many cooking simulators are lacking. Sure there are loads which will teach you how to bake a cake but what do you do when the ingredients run out? How to Cook Everything suggests you work with what you've got! The ingredients selection station was peppered with some normal food stuffs such as lettuce, meat, and bread but was that a hand grenade I saw? A rubber chicken?
We were expecting the game to resonate with people of all ages, and it did, but it scored big among young children. Two 7 year-olds played the game for almost 2 hours.
So we have the beginnings of a new type of project here, the only question is:
What do we do now?
Ryan's cool Thing of the Month:
How to Cook Everything We made a web version! Check it out!