With Cooking Pals completed, I’ve learned a lot about scoping and analysis of a team’s strengths and weaknesses. Throughout the design process, there were significant goals we wanted to achieve, but implementation was a massive barrier. In the end, through pivots and culling of game elements, I still think we created a game that mirrors the fun of worker management and the intrinsic rewards within an interaction loop to acquire resources (Fame, money, chefs), whilst also creating an intertwined system where the player’s choices would lead to direct impact on the system (a restaurant), and its inhabitants.
Overall, the system was modeled such that the player fulfilled the role of restaurant manager, deciding which animal chefs to hire, and responding to random “restaurant events” that would impact their money and fame, two resources they had to eternally watch. Throughout the process, they were given decisions that were more mainstream related to running a restaurant, but eventually more surprising decisions—such as a decision to sacrifice and cook one of their own chefs—come up; our playtesters had an immediate response of shock to such story elements, exactly as intended. This system was a rough modeling of the exploitation of workers, specifically in a restaurant environment, and we put in immense effort to get this message across. We wanted to lean into a “carefree-simulator” aesthetic for the initial aspects of the game, and slowly reveal more ominous components as the player played. While this would require significant implementation (purely in terms of quantity of content), we thought that the reward would be even greater if done this way.
Initially, I thought I was prepared to manage a System game, since my P1 game was also a Systems game. However, the difference between turn-based progression and real-time progression in Unity was immensely difficult to overcome, and our group did not have the most Unity experience. As such, we were forced to pivot to Twine to complete our project, but this pivot was made with minimal time left to complete the game. We made this decision to try and emphasize the narrative elements of our game, and salvage whatever aspects we had already developed. Ultimately, while some of the key gameplay elements we envisioned were unable to be captured, I think that our attempts to showcase the idea of a restaurant system varying based on player choices, as well as the choices of the manager having significant (life-ending) decisions for the workers they manage, still became evident in the final game.
While I am admittedly rather disappointed with how the final product came out, I know that I put in significant effort both in Unity, Twine, and any related narrative aspects, and tried my best to make a game that was both complex, and meaningful. Going forward, this project acts as a great lesson to continually evaluate my project roadmaps compared to my group’s capabilities, and better gauge at what point a project is unfeasible, and how to subsequently move forward.
