Creature Cafe
About this project
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Team:
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Me (Programmer, Designer, Writer, Sound Designer)
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Nitesh(Programmer, Designer, Writer)
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Tenn(Artist)
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Bikun(Artist)
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Engine: Unity and C#
You are a chef who runs a restaurant. Your customers are different monsters that have their own problems that are waiting to be solved. Use your delicious foods to comfort them and learn their story.
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This is a collaboration project between USC and Geidai(Tokyo University of the Art).
Design Process
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Experience Goal
- Players will be curious about the characters in the game.
- They will feel relieved when they solved the problem behind the characters.
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Ideation
Working in a team with people from different cultural backgrounds is fun. Our artist from Japan wanted to create some interesting monster figures. And we wanted to create a simple but elegant system. So, we came up with the idea of serving monsters with food and solving their problems. Below is a screen shot from our Miro board that shows some of the ideas.
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System Design
The biggest challenge of creating a system for this game is how to model the process of a person eating something and feeling happy.
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paper prototype
A basic idea is to numberalize the emotional value of different foods. So we created a paper prototype to test this idea. Players have four ingredients and four cooking methods. Each time they will have to choose an ingredient and a cooking method to cook a dish. The effect of the dishes is shown in the diagram. Each monster customer has four different kinds of negative emotions which are sadness, anger, fear and disgust. And players’ target is to clear these emotions’ value to zero.
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Playtest result
First, the matrix is too big, players don’t like to remember 16 different combinations of ingredients and cooking methods.
Second, it feels like a puzzle game more than a real time cooking game.
We solved these problems by shrinking the matrix to 3 by 3 and adding real time reaction to monsters in the digital version of our game.
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Narrative Design
The most attractive part of our game is different monsters. We want the appearance of the monsters to reflect their personality and their problems.
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Ferret
For example the Ferret is a shy girl. Her story is about the conflict between her and her parents. She’s not brave enough to tell her dream to her parents. When she meets the chef, she covers her face with a lot of hands. After the player solved her problem, she will reveal her true face.
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Golden fish
The Golden fish guy is an irritable person. He’s having trouble dealing with his fellow workers. He’s very angry when he comes to the chef. But if the player solves his problem, he will turn to a normal face.
It turns out that this is a successful strategy. Players from USC Games EXPO all like our monster design. They care about the monster's story and are trying to help the monsters eagerly.
