đŞOuter Platesđ˝ď¸
Premise of the game
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 bewareâcritics and health inspectors can drop by unannounced to evaluate your restaurant.
Gameplay Ideas
Core Mechanics
- Start off on a chosen planetÂ
- Distinct types of ingredients: can only access / make dishes out of if you have visited the planet at least onceÂ
- Can carry ingredients from location to location; exotic ingredients from one star system could be more enticing in other systems to encourage players to move their restaurant around a lot
- Distinct alien types: different probabilities for different species based on planet type
- Round:
- 4 players: can share tasks across stations or self assignÂ
- Tips: based on food quality, serving time, bonuses or quirks of different aliens
- When making food, the progress bar has different stages. For example, cooking on a stove for a while makes it âgoodâ, but if you keep cooking, it will hit a âsweet spotâ in which the food is of better quality. Going for too long will cause it to burn.
- âleveling upâ: use tips to upgrade items in the restaurant + explore new planets
- âWinning conditionâ:Â get to 5 âMichelinâ stars (Pulsar)
Extra Ideas
- Menu building mechanic:
- foundational dishes that can be augmented with whatever ingredients available
- ingredients are bought on the planet the restaurant is orbiting
- some ingredients will be planet specific, some staples will be widely available
- sweetness, saltiness, (third metric) values assigned to every dish
- aliens races roughly prefer certain flavors, but thereâs individual variation
- players design their menu, attempting to balance ease of prep, cost, and flavor
- all of this menu building is done in the context of the planet the restaurant is orbiting as the planet determines likelihood of customer types
- Intergalactic tow company(?) – tow your restaurant from one star system to another
- Can pay to be taken to a random star system, or pay more for a specific one
- Sound effects: cooking, score, sound when a customer walks in, general background music
- Critic/health inspector from Intergalactic Federation
- Own language
- Space punsÂ
- Potential Salad Bar off to the side that has to be stocked
- Anti-gravity on the ship can break
- Different gravity on different planets which impacts gameplay
- Really big monsters that take up excess space
- âMeatier Showerâ – Meteor Shower of Rare Meat Ingredients
- Emergencies
- Anti-gravity breaks
- Hole in ship requires spacewalk to patch up
Our âsliceâ
- Opening scene:
- âIn a universe where food distribution has been viciously optimized by cold robot vendors, a human (whose lineage draws from an ancient planet known as âEarthâ) seeks to revive a bygone practice of their forefathers: a classic diner experience.â
- Players choose between two planets
- Two types of customers
- Slug Slurper
- Fungal Duality
- x dish types: show x orders and x ratings/tip exchanges
- Three days âsliceâ:
- Day 1: Player starts a new restaurant and chooses one of the available locations
- Day 2: Player moves to another location and gets to upgrade restaurant
- Day 3: Player âfast-forwardsâ to a much more advanced restaurant
Aesthetic Elements
Characters/Dishes/Drinks
Arachnians
- Description: giant arachnid-like creatures
- Preferences: webby textures, high-protein insects
- Quirks: leave cobwebs over the place
- Dishes: âSpider Silk Sizzlerâ – web-wrapped roasted critters served with molten moonstone mustard.
- Drinks: âVenom Vortexâ – fermented spider venom with a twirl of asteroid apricot nectar.
Gaseous Gourmands
- Description: gas beings
- Preferences: vapors, ethereal substances
- Quirks: turn invisible at random times
- Dish: âNebula Noshâ – vaporized ether gas tacos with a hint of anti-matter salsa.
- Drinks: âFizzy Nebula Nectarâ – gaseous cloud cocktail with an interstellar vapor swirl.
Quantum Nomads
- Description: transient time travelers
- Preferences: temporal delicacies, chronal spices
- Quirks: can come to the diner twice in a day
- Dish: âTemporal Tacosâ – time-warped tortillas filled with paradoxical pork and chronal cilantro, garnished with wormhole salsa.
- Drink: âTime Ripple Tonicâ – Distilled chronal cider with a sprinkle of aged tachyon dust
Fungal Duality
- Description: Fungal person with a second head/mouth coming out of their head, you can feed either one
- Preferences: Dual-flavor dishes, spores and molds
- Quirks: Can only be satisfied if both heads/mouths are fed a balanced meal
- Dish: âSpore Stroganoffâ – Double-headed mushroom medley served with a moldy bĂŠchamel sauce
- Drink: âMycelium Meadâ – Fermented fungal honey with notes of truffle and a hint of cordyceps
Slug Slurpers
- Description: Slugs that plop their faces onto the plate and slurp up their food
- Preferences: Slimy stews, slurpable soups
- Quirks: Extremely slow eaters, requiring patience to serve
- Dish: âSwamp Stewâ – A thick, gelatinous stew of bog broth and pond scum, served with swampweed crackers
- Drink: âMucktail Martiniâ – A murky blend of bog water, moss essence, and fermented algae
Sketches + Moodboards
See our Figma document for more:
Next Steps đđ
Design
For the design process, we will be modifying free sprites and assets found on itch.io. We will first add additional elements to the downloaded sprites, think adding 3 more straws to a milkshake for an alien that has 4 mouths. After adding all necessary elements to the assets, we will be applying our chosen color palette to them to create a cohesive visual language.
Development
Asset Creation
- Store and dishes for one planet
- Alien types
- Diner decorations, cooking equipment
- Diner counters, furniture
Music/Sound Effects
- Cooking (bubbling, etc)
- Scoring of a dish
- Sound when a customer walks in
- General space themed background music
Environmental Construction
- Diner interior, decorations, cooking counters
- Background animation possibly:showing stars/galaxies/planets
Scripting
- Setting up food stations + making a dish
- Setting up buying using tips
- Character ordering + reviewing dish
- Tip calculation based on quality, time, and bonuses
We are using the Godot Engine v4.2.2. If Godot Engine 4 is updated, we will update the engine we are using. We will start by developing the core restaurant service mechanics in a pre-built restaurant. Then, we will begin to flesh out the more creative mechanics that we will layer on top of our existing mechanics. These include: reorganizing the furniture in the restaurant, buying more furniture, reorganizing the exterior of the diner/ship, and so forth.
Links to individual teammate posts
Caitlin:
https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/06/checkpoint-1-individual-concept-doc-6/
Alexander:
https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/07/checkpoint-1-conâŚalexander-worley/
Matthew:
Andreea:
https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/07/p2-checkpoint-1-individual-2/
Logan:
https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/07/checkpoint-1-4/
