Our team is working on a social deduction and judging game, where users all have a secret mission to accomplish, while in the meantime cooking recipes to please various judges. They are incentivized to hide their missions while also trying to guess other people’s missions.
1. How can we add variety to the recipes/judges to make the “cooking” part of the game very fun/interesting on its own?
From our brainstorming session in class, we are still pretty unsure about what kinds of recipes and food categories we want to include. Players will have to collect ingredients to make recipes; so how can we create diverse recipes that make the game fun and exciting each time instead of repetitive? We can try experimenting with different variations of one food item (e.g. chocolate, strawberry, cake), or broad food categories (e.g. steak, ravioli, etc). Prototyping with these categories can help us understand what foods are too broad, and what foods would be too specific.
2. How can we create scenarios/game rules that incentivize both objectives?
This is important because we do want players to focus on the main premise of the game, which is cooking to impress different judges’ personalities, but also want to add in fun elements by making them accomplish these secret missions. We will have to prototype with different point awards/win conditions in the cases that people accomplish their secret mission, but also to those who correctly guess other people’s secret mission.
3. What kinds of consequence/reward system are we going to create for the social deduction part of the game?
Social deduction games we’ve played such as Coup sometimes have consequence for players incorrectly guessing others’ roles. This is an important mechanic to prevent players from “infinitely” guessing at another player’s bluff/preventing excessive guessing that might ruin the premise of the game. This is important to consider because we want just the “right” amount of social deduction while not rewarding players who will incessantly go after other players rather than focusing on playing the game itself.
