Official Dialogue and Narrative

One of the issues everyone is dealing with is information overload. You did spend quite a bit of text trying to explain your point, but even after going over it a few times, it's still hard to figure out how to accurately respond to everything in it.

Your idea of gating the player in order to ensure they have mastery of the cooking mechanics/chick before they progress could be summarised as:

The idea of a pig walking and cooking is somewhat absurd, we're relying on the players to accept that and extend it to the idea of the pheonix chick being a companion and a tool. There will be a short segment at the start that explains how to cook/use the pheonix chick.

This is kind of a general response to this whole thread: Long verbose ideas, laying out a script, is good for brainstorming but it doesn't put us any closer to implementing anything in-game.

Right now we have:

1. Pig arrives to cook
   
2. gets an initial cooking tutorial
   
3. makes more meals/gather ingredients???
   
4. gets the approval of the Fry King by cooking the perfect dish

#3 is where most of the gameplay would be happening and where we need a clear direction. Obstacles that impede the pig from getting the approval of the fry king.

 

You want to show how they meet. That requires a cutscene with custom animations and sounds made just for that sequence.

What I do agree with you we need to address is something else, and it's what I quoted before:

Yes, we need to explain how to use the "tool" (or skill). That can be done with gameplay and text, in an early tutorial.

All input is great, I'm reading it and keeping it in mind, but we need to be realistic so not everything written here can make it in the plan. Especially in this thread it's easy to create a lot of work that others will have to resolve later, and that work might not necessarily become reality. If that gets to a critical mass, the project dies. I feel like we are already at the point where we have more than enough to work on, so any addition will have to stay a draft for now. You don't have to take it personally, in fact some of your input already made it into the story.

 

@neoshaman I personally don’t see why exploration, combat, gathering and cooking cannot be introduced with the chick already by your side familiarizing yourself with one action at a time. These are concerns mainly for the level-gameplay design and not the narrative I think for this project's scope. Also, it's good to discuss the character’s personal and emotional arc, but this regards the full game, so we should only show scattered information that reveal these.
In general I don’t think anybody is forcing any ideas or shutting anyone down, there are a lot of good points to a lot of posts and it’s ok to have preferences. For example, if you feel like ie. a social class matter could set the stakes better, that’s cool, but still it should not drive the main gameplay for what this 6 month open project is about, but rather dress it with some subtle commentary and dialogues, just like what @roxioxx did with the sketches above or @dickmendra with the nice cinematic storytelling. And subtle commentary is definitely NOT a thing to overlook at all. It’s just a matter of priorities for the time being to get things rolling. I think it’s good to start fresh with a new thread once we get a clearer structure to also help newcomers jump in for the dialogues.

PS: Instead of getting discouraged I would personally love if people went crazy and produced their own fan made stuff depicting something they liked from all these conversations without caring whether it’s gonna make it in the game or not, like what @roxioxx did or @shuttle127 who must have already finished a whole book of poems by now (without stacking this thread of course). Brings life to what we are doing and makes it even more fun to see how people become inspired and get inspired too. Maybe in the end we could have a whole gallery of fan made stuff that didn’t make it to the story, but are part of this project’s history.

See you in the next thread!

 

I am suggesting these with the scope of full sized game in mind.

Let the game world be many different islands, but there needs to be a hint of a bigger world out there, the bigger world which the natives fear and that is why they are unwelcoming of the pig chef initially.
In that regard, there needs to be some big location after the islands that feels satisfactory to reach after all this cooking based adventure.
Lets say maybe a cooking university which we can explore as a sequel.
And if that idea interests you, we could tie that in with this game by establishing that the fry king had misplaced the lost recipe on purpose so that no one can make that dish and get skilled enough to enter the university.
Because he is from a family of renowned chefs and he flunked the university, and wants no one from the island to know about it.

Other than a university, we can also go a magical kingdom route as we already have a phoenix in game. This can established with a simple once upon a time storybook style cutscene.
Phoenix are magical creatures and usually kept by wizards as companions.
So this chick's mother is a companion to a wizard from that far off kingdom.
They are in danger, maybe stuck in a volcano,but the chick doesn't remember where exactly did he run away from.
He only remembers his mother yelling save yourself and that cause trauma and passes out whenever he recalls it.
When the chick tried to run, a small eruption launched him all the way to the island, right on top of pig chef's head as he stepped down on to the beach.
This collision makes pig smell of volcano which the islanders consider bad omen, they call it the red smoke.
The chick is fearful from his ordeal and just hides in the lantern of his own.

For cutting a playable level short for the demo lets assume it is a mario stage with 4 worlds to explore.
In the level we our entering from the south, north is the stairs to next level.
Just beside the stairs are 2 npc that you begin quest chain on.
Only those quests that drop the items required to beat the level should be accessible in the demo.
East will have shops for gear and cooking items.
West will have a boss critter layer you beat it and you advance.
Boss critter combat:
As suggested earlier our chef is throwing morsels but for boss critter he needs bigger crumbs and for that he can use some consumable items to affect shape and size of different bits of food.
Or he can use the phoenix chick as well.
For instance he throws corn and the Phoenix chick pops them with his flame.
The popped corns hit the boss for critical damage.
You defeat it and grab the loot.
Finish the boss quest and proceed to the next level.

For dialogues, we can have classic rpg style
Text boxes appearing below the speaking characters avatar.

Will there be any voice acting? If not can we do ooh and aah expressions ourselves?

 

@aby_gamemaker lot of good ideas here, many that have been mentioned in some way shape or form already. To that end, wanted to point out that we went away from the idea of a foreigner scaring the locals many weeks ago to a story that focuses more on the island and townsfolk, and we need to start focusing on the story card. The game flow has also been outlined in this Miro board. The Phoenix chick back story could be explained that way, just need to see if it fits with the dialogue and timeline track and UI wireframes. As for the boss critters idea, the cooking system might not be involved in combat like that just yet, although that’s probably the first thing we’d want to work on once the basics are in place. And no, there will be no voice acting due to time and resource constraints (apologies for not linking the exact post that mentioned it).

I’ve got a few more ideas to share in this thread on what I think are the next steps to get this discussion going again, but it’s been a long day so I’ll try to get to it tomorrow.

 

Here's a fresh take, I'll edit it as newer information becomes available.

THE ISLAND
The island can be a cut section of an ancient kingdom with ruins of that culture spread across the island.
The forest eyes came to the island long ago foraging and made it their home. They are very superstitious and skeptical of outsiders.
They initially deemed bard unfit for the island with the intention to protect him from uncontrolled critter activity.

THE FESTIVAL
The festival had to be started to discourage the youth of clan from risking their lives in the seas during seasonal vortexes that form in the sea between this and the next island.

THE BARD
The bard is from a far off island, he came to this island quiet young and was not welcome as the forest eyes didn't want to assume an outsider's responsibility.
Though young the hare was raised in such an environment and ideals that his music and poems are way deep beyond his years.
This was why he was evicted a second time as he recited a very violent and graphic poem for the town administrator's children, horrifying everyone.

Note: In d&d bard is a magical class so we can let hamlet make hare realise he has magical abilities and is special. This can help us in a future sequel if we wish to explore the Phoenix chick's origin.

 

After live stream 3 and the presentation of the latest iteration of the gameplay loop with missions, it seems we’ve used up all the juice in this thread. The only outstanding question I have is did we decide on adding any additional chefs, whether townsfolk or some other previously proposed rival, but in the interest of time it’s probably best to not worry about that now and start moving onto which characters are giving which missions in a new thread, preferably with an example of a google spreadsheet outline provided.