Shoutout to a game Stephen's friends released recently called More Than You Can Chew, a game about making food in space! It doesn't quite match the game jam prompt but still quite on brand and worth checking out! It's pictured in the header image.
Your nice hosts settle their differences in opinions when it comes to food to serve up a fresh game design document in a new Nice Games Jam episode.
Prompt
Create a game with one of my favorite things, food! It cannot be about/or have mechanics that are cooking. Think: growing food, pairing foods, making an international food court, menu design, using foods in season, etc.
Game type
Design document
Player count
1
Rules
(Stephen note: This is more of a set of notes taken during the episode outlining a game design document.)
- Human in an alien culture, giving recommendations for pairings for food
- You should need to learn the rules before you can break them
- Gain credibility
- People order categories of food and you put it on the plate (no cooking)
- Gamer Journey
- You’re a plater at an alien restaurant
- You first do it like a human (based on taste)
- You get feedback that opposes basing plates on taste
- Player starts to get curious about how to make better plates to meet needs
- Sense criteria
- Touch
- Sight
- Temperature
- Spiciness
- Taste the “wine” to know what it “tastes” like
- The threat is if you do poorly you get shipped to another planet, they have different foods and different desires for foods
- Options to change
- Two ingredients (tomato and other tomato? Looks similar)
- Position of foods
- Container of foods
- Orientation of foods
- Aesthetic of the restaurant?
- You design the special
- Create one dish for the special, you get an amount of feedback based on the size of the restaurant
- You can tweak your dish based on the feedback you get
- Things change as you go through the game and impact what you have available and what patrons like
- The goal is for players to experiment with the different foods (positions, containers, etc.) so they begin to understand the rules of the game
- There can be clues with the background/worldbuilding so players can learn why the foods these aliens like are why they like them
- When do you get to influence cultures? Do you get to at all?
- Yes, you need to figure out a way to get aliens to love the food and not just like it