Game Premise
Outer Plates is the ultimate multiplayer intergalactic diner game. Set up a mobile space eatery on a planet of your choice, each home to unique alien species with distinct personalities, food preferences, and quirky habits like leaving slime trails or eating plates. Choosing a planet determines your primary customer base, challenging you to tailor your dishes to their tastes. Start with a single station, like the Bar, the Grub Hub, or the Delicacy Embassy, and gradually expand your diner. Each station offers subtasks like boiling, chopping, and garnishing, creating a fast-paced culinary experience that requires cooperative play and clever task delegation. Serve your alien patrons swiftly and skillfully to earn high ratings, tips, and progress toward the prestigious 5 Pulsar Stars needed to win. Accumulate tips to upgrade your kitchen, unlock special ingredients, or even upgrade your space vehicle to visit a new planet! But beware—critics and health inspectors can drop by unannounced to evaluate your restaurant.
Emotions
Players will experience a delightful blend of satisfaction, curiosity, and humor as they embark on their intergalactic culinary journey. The joy of serving perfectly prepared dishes to quirky alien patrons, earning high ratings, and generous tips, provides immense satisfaction. Curiosity drives players to explore the preferences, personalities, and peculiar habits of different alien species, creating dishes that cater to their unique tastes. Humor offers a breather from the fast-paced gameplay, as players witness exaggerated alien reactions to their meals and navigate the eccentric challenges posed by their otherworldly customers. From slime trails to aggressive slurping of meals to gnawing on diner furniture, Outer Plates keeps players challenged and entertained as they build their diner empire across the galaxy.
Mood + Musical Board
Features inspirational images for the art styles we might want to incorporate into our different alien types (left), food/drinks (middle), and general environment aesthetics (right).
Spotify Playlist
As a group, we created a shared playlist (see here) that fits our game idea’s aesthetics. Below is a screenshot of the songs I added (~20 min long):
I chose songs spanning Japanese 80’s city pop, Japanese jazz, and pop-jazz fusion to set the musical backdrop for our theme. These genres create a vibrant, futuristic atmosphere that complements the eclectic energy of an intergalactic eatery. The upbeat rhythms of city pop, the sophisticated melodies of jazz, and the imaginative blend of styles in jazz fusion add a layer of energy, whimsy, and sophistication to Outer Plates.
Potential Game Directions
Diner/World Layout
The designs below feature a tri-cyclical counter with different stations (bar, grub, and delicacies). Each player can man a single station or players can coordinate to help with shared jobs between stations. Different camera angles are shown: e.g. front facing camera (faces customers at a station) and back camera view (faces backs of customers). Miniaturized order tickets hover above the customers’ heads and contain information about how many ingredient types are needed to fulfill the order along with any bonuses achieved for serving the customer. Players can exit the cooking and serving counter through 3 exit gaps to fetch special ingredients from the special pantry – serves as an inventory for planet specific ingredients, power ups, etc that can be added to meals (at risk of making customers impatient due to extra delay).
Mechanics of a “Day”
- Upon starting, players choose which planet to set up their diner (stationed inside a mobile space vehicle): each planet features a different population make up of different alien species
- each species has a certain personality, food/drink preferences, habits (leaving slime on the floor, giving extra tips, etc)
- settling on a planet will bias the number of customers towards the most popular species type
- Players decide which station to serve (will likely be gradual build up of components i.e. first level might just contain one station type) e.g. the bar, “the grub hub”, and the “delicacy embassy”
- Stations contain their own subtasks like boiling ingredients, chopping, garnishing, etc
- Food rating: after serving the dish, customers will give a rating based on food quality, timeliness, etc which will translate to a certain amount of tips + increase in progress towards the 5 “pulsar” stars (aka Michelin stars) needed to “win”
- Tips accumulate over each time cycle and can be used to upgrade equipment in the diner, upgrade ship to make a trip to another planet, buy special ingredients, etc
Alien Species + Dish Ideas
1.
- Species: “Arachnians” – giant arachnid-like creatures
- Preferences: webby textures, high-protein insects
- Quirks: leave cobwebs on the counters
- Dishes: “Spider Silk Sizzler” – web-wrapped roasted critters served with molten moonstone mustard.
- Drinks: “Venom Vortex” – fermented spider venom with a twirl of asteroid apricot nectar.
2.
- Species: “Gaseous Gourmands” – ethereal gas beings
- Preferences: vapors, ethereal substances
- Quirks: Can randomly turn transparent
- Dishes: “Nebula Nosh” – vaporized ether gas tacos with a hint of anti-matter salsa.
- Drinks: “Fizzy Nebula Nectar” – gaseous cloud cocktail with an interstellar vapor swirl.
3.
- Species: “Quantum Nomads” – transient time travelers
- Preferences: temporal delicacies, chronal spices
- Quirks: can show up twice on the same day
- Dish: “Temporal Tacos” – time-warped tortillas filled with paradoxical pork and chronal cilantro, garnished with wormhole salsa.
- Drink: “Time Ripple Tonic” – Distilled chronal cider with a sprinkle of aged tachyon dust
