So I’m proposing a cooking or crafting system in response to a few things:
- The initial concept is very concerned with cooking. Our hero is a ‘chef’ the goal is a ‘recipe’ why not let the pig do some of the cooking?
- There has been quite a bit of talk already about an inventory system , collecting resources to craft would utilize this system
- There has not been much talk of what gameplay will entail. Brief nods to zelda-likes like Tunic have been made , but with the express notion that combat wouldn’t be the primary component. cooking meals for people, crafting items to use could be the main component.
Food could be created to serve as health items, food could be created to serve as abilities. A hearty dish could make you run really fast, you could feed food to the Phoenix Chick to have it shoot out fire blasts. Food could be made to pacify large enemies, stinky food could be made to scare enemies. Food could be made to create lures for rare creatures required for more complex recipes. Food could be used to interact with NPC’s to gain favor with guards, to help hungry/sick NPC’s feel better. Of course, the cooking system could also be seen as a crafting system and used to create items that weren’t strictly food.
Players would have to collect the necessary recipes from NPCs or recipe books beforehand and then go out into the forest to collect the necessary ingredients, using a minimal combat system to deal with close dangers and ‘collect’ creatures. Players might even have to trade ingredients with an NPC to get the specific ingredients they need. Certain dishes might require a special oven which is only available in a set place with a specific NPC.
Crafting could take place completely in menus, but really I think it would be more engaging if it required player input in the game world.
gameplay from Overcooked comes to mind. The Chef could carry a pot and a small mat/cutting board that could be deployed in the gameworld (sorta like the deck from quadrilateral cowboy, quicker though)
the player would have to manually place/combine ingredients and use tools to prepare the dish, using the Phoenix Chick to cook the dish on the pot or broil it on the mat.
I realize this is maybe a bit big, and I’m okay if we don’t go down this route, but I would appreciate some discussion on what we want the moment to moment gameplay to look like. Should it be mostly exploration? Talking a bunch to NPCs? Solving environmental puzzles?
googledocs link: