This quarter, I worked on Cooking Pals with Lucas and Noé, since 1. I was still super attached to the concept that I generated in CS 377G and 2. I’m a spiteful little shit that didn’t want the idea I had grown attached to die as a failure. After a quarter of trials and tribulations, I can gladly say that Cooking Pals is no longer a failure. Sure, it’s not quite where I expected it to be going in, but given all that happened to me this quarter, I’m very happy with how it turned out, and learned a lot about my priorities in life.

In case you haven’t talked to me in the past year or two, Cooking Pals was my “P3 systems game” for P3 of CS 377G, which was intended as a cooking management simulator. The key thesis of the game is that you manage a tight kitchen, and need to choose which Pals (anthropomorphic animals) you want to hire and cook with. Abusing the effectiveness of double entendre, the game takes a serious twist when it presents the player the opportunity to kill their chefs and use their meat in cooking instead, to save money and earn better rewards than the ingredients currently used. As established in 377G, the game presents itself as a complicity game (shocker, I like working on those) wherein the player must evaluate how much they value the lives of people who are, objectively, more valuable to them dead than alive, providing commentary on how quickly capitalist megacorporations will leave their employees to rot. And, in case you haven’t talked to me in the past year or two, you would have heard me rant about how much I loved the concept of the game, but that it turned out to be an absolute bust in terms of implementation. After two weeks of work, basically nothing was done, and I learned a huge lesson on scoping and teammate resource management. It was so bad that when I brought the idea of revisiting it up to Haven, they rightfully expressed my insanity

But this quarter was different.

First off, Lucas and Noé are such wonderful and capable project partners. After initial forecasting (since they were uncertain of their commitment to the project by week 1), we had multiple meetings and in-depth discussions about implementation strategies, desires, and schedules, and arrived at a good assignment of roles. TLDR: I would be focusing on writing the narratives (since you already knew I loved to yap, and already had experience writing vast narratives solo from 247G and 377G), while the other two focused on visuals and gameplay interactions (notably, cooking). I genuinely believe that it took three days of work to surpass that which my 5-person team accomplished in 2 weeks in 377G. Images were being made, Unity systems and managers had complete skeletons, and the lore of the entire world was established: what do the people eat? (synthetic meat); do people know what real meat tastes like? (no, they just think it’s really high quality synthetic meat); to what extent are the anthropomorphized people integrated amongst each other? We had everything planned out, and whenever I playtested with someone, they were always satisfied to hear the answer (indicating that implementation of such as an embedded narrative would be effective). When I discussed the gameplay loop (morning interview, prep phase to chat with chefs for relationship status, cooking rush phase, drive home phase for exposition), everything seemed to flow together well, and lean both mechanically and aesthetically exactly how I desired. I was writing on-pace, and was feeling so confident that it would be the game I imagined by 10 weeks (which was a high-fidelity MVP with at least 1 character, and ideally, a few more).

But Everything Changed When The Fire Nation Nina Attacked

At the end of Week 5, Nina committed unscrupulous crimes against humanity, and proceeded to break not only Christina’s fingers but dislocate her elbow. As head TA for CS 247G, I took up the mantle of lecturing class for a few weeks, including revising the lecture slides to have an additional hour of content to account for the shift away from sections last year, and preparing for lecture so that they didn’t feel lesser. So for every lecture (which was about 4? not including the first week, when Nina got Christina stranded in Belize… I think I lectured this quarter about as many days as Christina did, wow!), I think I ended up spending an additional 3-5 hours on CS 247G per lecture covered, as I always wanted at least 1 dry run-through of lecture at home to ensure no slides surprised or confused me. And that doesn’t count the day of the incident, where I spent an additional 4 hours taking care of Nina instead of doing any coursework. And then, I also had a law school honors thesis paper to write (because, the tryhard that I am, enrolled in a course that fulfils the Law School Honors Paper Requirement, just to pursue my interest of Video Game Law).

The result? Cooking Pals took the backseat for a few weeks. Looking back, I probably could have tried less, scuffed lecture a bit more, and prioritized my own projects over the students (and play the role of “mean TA” like I pretend to be), but a part of me just realized that I prioritized 247G more than my own personal endeavors. Sure, a part of it might’ve had to do with it technically being my job, but things went way past my listed job requirements, so, I feel like I would’ve been justified putting in less effort.

But I wouldn’t have been satisfied with myself.

I’m coming to realize that I just really enjoy watching games being made. I flourish with simply the knowledge to know that I got to watch the game grow. To me, prioritizing CS 247G was slightly altruistic, in the sense that maybe my game would be worse, but others’ would be better (and I think this is truly the case). Simply being at SGVD Demo Day filled me with so much joy, even though I didn’t particularly want to demo anything (although I did, and seeing the players have a blast was also reaffirming and satisfying beyond belief). And I feel like the lectures I gave went well, really well, and wouldn’t have been satisfied with myself otherwise.

Of course, and rightfully so, Lucas and Noé got a bit discouraged by my bottlenecked progress (as it’s hard to implement specific scenarios dependent on narrative when the narrative isn’t there), but luckily, they were inspired to create another game (Animals of Wheels), and knowing how Lucas used to mod Friday Night Funkin’, I couldn’t help but find joy in how the two of the ended up finding another silly concept to put from idea into reality, and even found joy in acting as a playtester to throw ideas at during 247G Office Hours. Seeing their success and joy, I didn’t really feel a need to “remind” them that I had enough narrative to proceed with Cooking Pals technical implementations, I was weirdly just fulfilled to see my friends having fun.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

At the end of the day (or week, or quarter, whatever), we’re at ~Week 8 of our plan. But, given the circumstances and extra responsibilities, I’m weirdly not upset. The game is still a functional MVP, and for once, I am content with not achieving my (highly ambitious) initial goals. We have the dialogue for the first character (Henrietta, a “loving grandmother” vibe), which got positive reception in my playtests, and we have the beautiful scenes and gameplay implementations you see below.

So, what did I learn about my priorities in life? I just love seeing myself, my friends, and my students, create something really cool. I’m okay prioritizing other creative endeavors over my own, partially because I know that I’ll eventually have the free time to enact my vision. I didn’t go as far as expected, but I feel strongly that I am more than capable of getting there, given a few more weeks. But, as someone preparing for 1L at Gonzaga Law, I have such limited time to enjoy the remaining limited experiences I can get with my Stanford friends. If that means I conclude my academic year where some fictional animals’ gruesome deaths don’t get written for a few weeks, that’s fine with me. And over summer, when I take my final singular unit of CS399 before I graduate, I look forward to seeing what other wonders my friends create. (And, if Noé and Lucas don’t want to work on Cooking Pals any longer, I always have my Epistolary game to return to… It is Pride Month after all!)

Lastly, and most importantly, I learned that no matter how much I pretend to be mad at Nina for upsetting the balance of my entire quarter, I will always forgive her in the end. I look forward to another summer of 247G, and concluding my Stanford career with a bang.