cooking/crafting system -- or gameplay design

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:

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6386583--711708--i know you'll make the right choice, my record speaks for itsself2.jpg
DEAR LORD ALMIGHTY!!!

LET THE PIG COOK YOU A MEAL!!!

~thats all im sayin~

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I immediately thought Overcooked as well but didn’t want to rip that off completely. Another option (although definitely more violent) is Battle Chef Brigade, where defeating enemies becomes ingredients to cooking.

Since we didn’t want to go down the killing road, how about to defeat enemies, chef must give them their favorite dish? @invadererik suggested this in another thread . Perhaps chef builds a special cooking energy via a collectable resource, and after a set amount of resource has been consumed, chef can do some kind of QTE or solve a puzzle like in Pokemon Cafe Mix. Loving the idea of throwing out food to placate any hostiles more and more!

We could also have a collectable resource that works like a korok seed quest, although instead of inventory expansion, it’s cooking capability expansion, i.e. after X amount of resources collected, gain a new ability/recipe.

In the interest of keeping it lean per @cirocontinisio 's request in the Official Dialogue and Narrative thread , we might choose only one of these ideas for now? Although I think both could go hand-in-hand if we have the bandwidth to make it happen.

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I think we should definitely have some sort of cooking/crafting going on in the game.

So the plot has been updated based on concerns in the Official Dialogue and Narrative thread , sounds like this gameplay should have a bigger emphasis now.

hey, @Zold2012 I really like the idea of having a cooking/crafting system. It fits the theme perfectly.
Using the dishes for combat but also for all kinds of non-combat tasks can really expand gameplay, so we can put less emphasis on combat. Also, cooking in the game world is charming, and using phoenix for cooking is a great way of giving the one tool multiple uses is a game (light env, combat, cooking…).

What I’m not very fond of is a complex craft system or be limited to only cook something after you get a recipe. I usually prefer something that the player can explore and discover, and that doesn’t require memorization or checking a list.

What I propose is something inspired in Kirby 64.

A recipe would consist of a combination of 1 or 2 ingredients. Maybe 3 at maximum. We wanna make it simple. The output of a recipe is usually something very intuitive based on the effects of the individual ingredients. For example, if you have a fruit that makes you transparent and a fruit that sets you on fire, the combination of them could maybe turn you into smoke. Or the combination of an ingredient that makes you havier and an ingredient that makes you stronger, can give you super resistance.

The focus of this design is having fun combining different ingredients and discovering what effect will you get. Also, every time you discover a new ingredient you’ll want to combine it with the ingredients you already had.

By making it easy and intuitive, the main gameplay loop could be finding the combination of ingredients that will allow you to complete the different kinds of tasks in the game. For example, combining ingredients tom make you super strong to overcome battle, or finding a recipe that makes you super heavy to explore underwater, or even a combination to make you bouncy to reach high terrain.

Also, a simple crafting system can make it easier to combine the ingredients in the game world as it has already been purposed. The different ingredients could be found by exploration, combat, or quests like @Zold2012 or @shuttle127 suggested.

What do you think, guys?

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discovering recipes through experimentation definitely has possibility @erizzoalbuquerque
It reminds me of alchemy in skyrim where if you discover a useful recipe it’s recorded for later use. That actually highlights a progression issue I hadn’t thought of yet. If dishes aren’t locked behind first collecting a recipe, then the factor limiting progression would be the collection of ingredients. They would need to be gated to ensure players completed tasks in the intended order.

I’d like to try something a bit more complicated for the cooking so it feels like cooking, but it might not be feasible. Recipes in Overcooked largely consist of 1-3 components, but there is an order you have to construct them in.

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I like the idea of using ingredients for limiting player progression.

An ingredient would work kind as a power-up in a metroidvania. Once, a player got access to a new ingredient he could combine with his previous ingredients to get access to new skills and upgrades. Then it could use it to access new areas or complete quests.

Also, the rarity of an ingredient could be used to make very powerful skills more expensive to be used.

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I imagine something more like cooking mama, where each individual dish is its own thing, and you are rated on how well you achieved it at the end.

So basically you collect ingredients through out the level, that unlock a recipe, then based on how you perform the recipe, the creatures that eat that type of food are satisfied ( the smaller versions of the creatures fall asleep with lower grades, and the bigger versions of the creatures dont fall asleep unless you get a high grade), therefore you can skip some fighting depending on how you do.

I like your idea @Zold2012 and I have some suggestions for the main gameplay.

I was thinking that combat could be about protecting the ingredients that you have gathered. Something along the lines of critters will attack you based on what ingredients/items you are carrying (the idea being that critters are attacking you for food) and if you lose the encounter you will have to gather the ingredient again.

I also like the idea of using recipes to limit player progression. We could have smaller or simpler recipes which we will need to cook in order to progress.

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So here’s my ‘blue sky’ approach to the cooking system. I largely see it as an expansion of the mechanics present in Overcooked.

You have a pot/skillet, Camp grill/wire rack, and a cutting board to prepare food on. These would be carried with you and deployed into the game world at any time to prepare food on. There are other prep stations throughout the world like ovens that would be required for specific dishes.

To actually prepare food you would use utensils. Utensils would be a wooden spoon, knife, or the Phoenix chick. Spoon would be used for stirring, flipping, serving or transferring food. Knife would be used for peeling/preparing, chopping, and mincing. Torch chick would be used in conjunction with the Pot or Grill in order to cook stuff.

We talked about using ingredients to gate progress, but prep stations and utensils could also be used as gates. Instead of locking components of a recipe, we lock the tools necessary to prepare it. Also, I’m almost immediately thinking it would be a good idea to drop the grill/cutting board from your portable prep stations as it just sounds like a lot of stuff for the player to manage. Instead, you would have to reply on flat rocks/tree stumps to provide space to prepare ingredients on. It might also be possible to chop stuff on a skillet? just a thought.

In Overcooked the main gameplay is concerned with the logistics of moving ingredients from one prep station to another in order to prepare as much food as possible within a timeframe. In our game, it’s unlikely we’ll have to worry about preparing more than one dish at a time, which would open up space for the actual preparation to receive more focus.

Actions with utensils could be delineated by different lengths/different amounts of button presses. For instance, a long held button press with the knife would peel a potato, ~3 short button presses would chop, and 3 more (6 total) presses would mince it. The spoon would operate similarly, Long press would flip an egg, short presses would scramble the egg. So to cook an omelet, you would put the egg on the skillet, scramble it with a few short presses, let it cook, add a second ingredient as a filling, then flip it with a long button press.

Since our game is a single-player adventure that has a story, I am trying to think of ways to maintain flow while achieving qualities such as simplicity, clear goals and direct feedback like what Overcooked implemented. For this reason, I’ll try to fit what is being discussed under some main questions that I think we are trying to answer here:

What role does cooking play in our game?

  1. Survival for us and our Phoenix chick - produce health items ( @Zold2012 ).
  2. It could provide an alternative way of “defeating” someone by entering a cooking challenge with that character ( @invadererik ) .
  3. It could lure creatures that are needed for recipes (Zold2012). (or are we going vegan?:smile:)
  4. It could keep aggressive creatures away/busy/calm (Zold2012**,** @shuttle127 ).
  5. It could become a social tool to achieve some goals and affect the narrative – used “to gain favor/provide help (Zold2012)” or “reputation” or “bonding” (as @michaelgrilo has mentioned in the Level Design thread).
  6. It could produce some temporary power ups/abilities for us or the Phoenix chick to use (Zold2012) .
  7. Mixing ingredients to produce other outcomes than food to tackle perhaps different kind of puzzles ( @erizzoalbuquerque ).

How do the players get a sense of progression in gameplay (apart from the story)?

  1. You could gather certain special ingredients that start becoming rarer and more challenging to get – or protect (use of combat as defense, @vak1793 )
  2. You could learn special cooking techniques that become more complex along the way allowing for more unique dishes to be made.
  3. You start learning new recipes, that become more demanding/challenging to follow
  4. You could get access to/upgrade specific cooking tools that unlock new ways of cooking (like the ovens that Zold2012 has mentioned above, and @shuttle127 has made a simalar mention before in the LevelDesign thread).

Since we have an inventory and potential quests/abilities, it’s easy to assume that our character might gain XPs on some things along the game. Maybe that “Silver Knife” needs a Lvl2 in “chopping” skills to be used. Or maybe an uknown ingredient needs a special technique to get its juices out that could be unlocked after Pig Chef… [Insert Story Here].

How can the cooking experience become translated in controls?
Concern introduced by Zold2012 right above.

What do we want the players to experience? What kind of gameplay do we aim for?

I would love to allow our players to become creative. After all, that’s what cooking is all about. And creativity is indeed based on intuition! It can make the players feel so smart and proud that they thought of an interesting combination and brought a solution to a problem. It would be great if they could surprise themselves, and us.
So, in the same line of thought with @erizzoalbuquerque , I think it’s brilliant to play with the idea that A + B can produce C to tackle a challenge, and introducing special fruits with unique abilities/powers that enable other kinds of “cooking”/tasks when mixed together to tackle maybe environmental/combat/quest puzzles.

These fruits could provide a hint of their ability in a very straight-forward way, so it will be up to the observing skills of our players to spot one and collect it. We could even provide a record of how many there are on the map to keep the players searching and scratching their heads.

For example: Since erizzoalbuquerque mentioned an ingredient that could make something invisible, I can imagine having an actual invisible object for our players to spot on the map. A hint could be having some elements (ie. rocks) standing peculiarly mid-air, as if standing on a hidden object, a hint to the invisible fruit. Speaking of fruits…I can’t stop thinking of the Devil Fruits in One Piece (for the anime followers) so I am going to leave this here as a reference.

To conclude, I think that could be the kind of excitement that our game could provide:
Figuring out interesting combinations of elements, that will let the players come up with a fine ”dish” to tackle challenges in unique, creative ways.

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Just FYI, there’s some important discussion going on in the Narrative thread: Dialogue and Narrative

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I immediatly thought about Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma Anime when I first saw the idea of the project :p:smile:

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Apparently, most of the cooking design is being discussed and decided outside this thread. But, even so, here some comments.

As in Zelda Breath of the Wild that you have just a little number of skills, that can combine intuitively into a lot of different results, I think the cooking system should be simple, with only a few ingredients that can be combined very intuitively into new outcomes that are usually the expected result of summing the effects of the ingredients.

I think this system rewards creativity, curiosity, and the player’s capacity to inferring new recipes based on his prior knowledge of the ingredients rather than just following instructions or memorizing combinations of random ingredients.

I think @itsLevi0sa idea is perfect for this kind of design. The player needs curiosity to check/notice the strange rocks floating and, after getting the ingredient, he can immediately imagine its effect without being told. Besides, he can create expectations of what effects he will get by combining this new ingredient with the effects of the ingredients he got before. Sounds like a very fun toy to me hehe :slight_smile:

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I really appreciate @itsLevi0sa 's post collating the design ideas up till now. I also think our next goal should be thinking of specific challenges that could be solved with the cooking system. Maintaining player flow is also something to be concerned with. Gameplay should have a certain rhythm comparable to a more action-based game.

I would group cooking challenges into two groups:

moment to moment dishes

  • used during adventuring in response to obstacle challenges (enemies, locomotion, environmental danger)
  • component ingredients are in the same area as the challenge
  • OR more difficult areas might require a few (1-2) ingredients to be stockpiled from another area beforehand
  • could require experimentation to discover rather than being prescribed by a recipe

goal dishes

  • dishes used to progress the story, whether that be by interaction with an NPC or unlocking a new area
  • rarer ingredients/preparation tools.
  • recipes are given as they should require more complicated cooking and thus would be less prone to success by experimentation

Basically, use the moment to moment dishes to gather necessary ingredients for goal dishes. Moment to moment dishes would exclusively use the Pheonix Chick and your personal prep stations (player can cook when they arrive at a challenge), while goal dishes could be required to use world-based prep stations like ovens.

I would guestimate having 3-5 goal dishes would be a good target? This is where the narrative thread can start suggesting stuff/characters to interact with.

Again, dish challenges are obstacles that require a recipe to overcome. Moment to moment dishes are made in response to an immediate obstacle. Goal dishes are made in response to a known objective.

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Also, somewhat of an amendment/response to cooking mechanics. Originally I had workspaces separate from utensils, but this isn’t how Overcooked does it, and honestly the more I think about it it’s hard to justify using a knife with a pot or a spoon with a cutting-board. But there would be room to use the Chick on the pot and the Chick on the cutting-board (broiling) so maybe the Pheonix Chick is its own thing?

Also in the narrative thread @cirocontinisio mentioned having the cooking mechanics contained within a UI system. I’d prefer there be some feeling of world interaction with the cooking system, but if it does need to be simplified to a menu-based system then I’d like to outline what the important parts I’d like transferred over.

I’d like there to be an order of operations necessary to complete recipes. Most crafting systems (BOTW cooking included) work on an x+y = z formula. But actual recipes usually require more steps than ‘throw everything in a pot and heat it up’

In the LOZ:Wind Waker, the wind waker could open a dropdown menu of all currently known spells for the player to choose, but instead of this, wind waker requires you to perform a specific melody with the controller movements. This is part of a franchise theme in Zelda games of playing musical instruments. There is nothing inherently satisfying about choosing a song to play on an mp3 player, but there is something satisfying about playing a melody on an instrument. In the same vein, I’d like cooking in our game to receive similar treatment to music in Zelda. Being able to prepare a dish quickly after learning the muscle memory for it would feel satisfying in the same way playing a melody in Wind Waker from muscle memory would.

In a menu based system, you could still have options to do different actions (peeling a potato vs chopping a potato) to different ingredients, and the order you performed actions would change the outcome (adding omelet fillings after scrambling vs before)

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What about a mini match 3 game of ingredients? The board only fills with the ingredients already collected, and chef needs X amount of matches to make the dish.

Maybe? I know that’s how the Battle Chef Brigade game you mentioned worked, I’d need to investigate it more

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I suggested QTEs once or twice in other threads, but crickets in response. Yes many people don’t like them and I can see the breaking immersion angle, although maybe they could work in a closeup/first person view? Something like a rhythm game now that I think of it, having to time when to slice, when to dice, when to shake, when to stir, etc.

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