Values, Arcs, and Loops in our P3 Game
Values
Our game, Cooking Pals, puts the player in the position of a restaurateur opening an establishment for animals, staffed by animal chefs. However, chefs who are prey animals can be killed and their meat used for “specialty dishes”, netting the player tons of cash. We want money to be quite tight so that making a profit is very difficult if the player refuses to make specialty dishes. The player should be constantly tempted to kill their employees for their meat.
Ideally, the tension the game creates a tension between preserving life and making money. Additionally, we want a slaughter-tolerant strategy to cause the player to shift from viewing prey chefs from agents to objects, from employees to stores of meat. In general, I feel the game will communicate values of anti-capitalism, or at least equality, pro-labor politics, and workers’ rights.
Arcs
An important arc in the game will the be starting sequence that introduces the player to the premise of the game. We want to have a visual-novel-style dialogue interface that gives some introductory narration. I think it’ll be an interesting challenge to balance giving the player useful information against compelling narration that doesn’t break immersion.
Loops
The most important loop of the game will probably be the to-kill-or-not-to-kill loop. To create an experience that evolves as the player encounters repeated iterations of the loop, we probably shouldn’t give the whole game away immediately. The feedback should be relatively subtle. Rather than explicitly narrating a scene of a chef getting killed in front of the player character, we are going to have a predator chef say they will “find some meat.” Then return some time later with ingredients. We’ll also have one prey chef dissapear from the kitchen. Because the prey chef dissapearing is feedback that will not be connected temporally to the player making the decision to serve a specialty dish, we’ll communicate the connection to the player by having specialty dishes that clearly calls for meat from a prey animal as an ingredient e.g. ceviche, burgers, rabbit stew, etc.
