Official Game flow diagram

Hey @ChemaDmk thank you for the diagram you have provided us it really clears things out a lot.
Ι personally find the second diagram clearer as it seems more linear - easier for me to read than keeping an eye on the arrows and different text formats in the first proposal. Both are understandable of course.
Thinking about how the community could start contributing to the narrative and the game flow following your proposal and structure approach.. Since we need to decide on one Main Mission and several Side Missions (tasks that show hints and not straight-forward quests), my understanding is that we are going for 2 different approaches-contribution “formats”.

Example of Main Mission (a key story that has a main obstacle our player has to tackle):
Chema: an old lady who knows a lot BUT has memory issues
itsLevi0sa: an old Townsfolk who remembers a really cool recipe BUT falsely believes some ingredients have long been lost due to some previous disaster
And then other people can jump in proposing a similar structured idea. (Still not sure how to decide on one main idea in the end, but trust that we’ll or you’ll get to that.)

And then for the side missions perhaps we could leave space for various on-going contributions to make it into the game as dialogues that would point to specific ingredients scattered in map without really affecting the main development-main mission but still make room for interesting details?

Example: Let’s say that the main mission is the old lady with the memory issues. Then 2 main tasks could be:
1. To find some herbs for the towns pharmacist to make some medicine to help
2. To bring something personal to her to help her remember (ie. a favorite flower that reminds her of something)
Then every other random side mission hint that the community might come up with, could point to an equivalent random ingredient/objective the community has thought of PLUS either a herb for task No1 or a flower for task No2.

An example of Side Mission (Hint dialogue):
I can imagine ie. having a Tinsmith in our town who would be responsible of making all these utensils. Since we have a rock path and rock critters, I can also imagine gathering perhaps some ore apart from food ingredients, where that ore could help the tinsmith make something for us. And as soon as we are in the Rock Path maybe we find that rare herb or flower for our Main Mission. And if we don’t, we will then have to help a different NPC who will point us to a different task but still allow us to get these herbs/flower that are necessary to progress in the main story.

In this way it can be totally random which NPC’s hint you will follow or what kind of ingredient you will end up picking, but as soon as you have helped a certain number of characters then you ‘ll have enough ingredients/tasks done to fulfill the main missions goal. Probably resulting to a different dish for different players which might be interesting! Plus it could make the game replayable, or leave space for lots of Easter Eggs.
(Perhaps we could even have different Key characters with different Main Missions that as soon as ONE is chosen by our players, we could spawn the analogous Main Mission objectives in map while transforming any other Key character to a non-important NPC to not have different main missions collide. But let’s start with one Main Mission first )

Other concerns: Regarding the communication between different related threads that should all feed this particular thread, I came up with this post . Not sure if it’s going to bring more help or confusion, I am sharing it more in the manner of “I am just going to leave this here” and see what happens.
Looking forward to what ideas are going to be brought in the table!

 

Hey @ChemaDmk my bad, I thought the side quests implied by the hints would be linked to the main gameplay. Since they can be ignored, do these play the role of Easter Eggs then?
My intention was to discuss the flow and not the content really (yeah it didn’t come out really clear) and I didn’t mean for any further typing to replace the diagrams, diagrams are definitely the way to go to structure any content input. So - switching to diagram mode, I guess what I wanted to describe was something like this:

A flow about how the Main Mission could be structured and how any random hints could aid it, where everyone could replace any text with a different idea in the Narrative thread. Since hints are optimal though, maybe we could achieve these Main Task objectives in the same manner as we go through the other quests. The whole idea is that we have a Long Time Mission that introduces X number of tasks (ie. 2). These tasks have a “roadblock”: they need you to find something you do not know how or where to find it (ie. herbs/rare ingredient). But as you follow the other quests you slowly find the Long Mission related objectives achieving the final task.

PS: I say Main Task to differentiate from a Quest. Quests are the bigger bubbles that make our Game Loop (our Long Time Mission is a Quest) and then Tasks are steps you need to complete to achieve a Quest.

Cool, makes sense!

 

Hi everyone,in the 2nd game flow diagram,can we add some font or box border line color differences to those blue boxes to make it clearer every sigle mission connecting to which systems?It will be easier to find out whether some systems are not engaged enough.

As to side missions,I have no idea what can they reward Hamlet,if the rewards are only hints,maybe players will feel hard work before is in vein or less valuable as main missions reward.Maybe some collectable souvenirs?

 

On the other hand the player might get distracted. As I gather the hints are clues to win the game - if you get fancy rewards you might miss the hints, which is the original purpose of the side missions.

Maybe the reward should be something connected with the hint - like a recipe containing the ingredient he needs to get. Or he gets shown a map (just shown, it wouldn't go into his inventory) containing the area where he would find the ingredient.

 

I'm wondering if there could be alternative ways to "get a mission" and "win a prize" . Because I think the game might feel a little repetitive if the loop is that you talk to a character, get a mission, do the mission, etc. For example could you get a mission by reading a book that you find.

 

Or maybe a singing tree

 

Easter eggs can deliver hints like the pokeballs drop items in pokemon games.
Our chef could search within prop items and plants on the beach.

 

Good week everyone. I’ve been looking at the Game Map and I have several questions for discussion for the main core of the game.
We have 4 Key Ingredients to find, where each of which is going to be part of a different quest, so it seems like we have:

• 4 main quests, regarding a different part of the map (Beach, Forest, Rock Path, Town) obtaining one Key ingredient at a time.
• And then we have the Long Term Quest that is going to give us the X reason of making that winning dish.

Question 1: What is the winning formula going to be?And what will the Long Term Quest's role in that be?
4 Key Ingredients + Utensils + Key Recipe = Winning Dish?
Question 2: Is each of these 4 main quests going to be assigned by a different NPC(Key Character) or will some of these be linked to one NPC? Will they serve parts of the Long Term Quest or will they exist separately?
Question 3: I guess each Key ingredient should be obtained after some effort/a puzzle solving of some sort. What could that be?

1. I 'd expect at least one Key Ingredient to be obtained from critters, but after a bit of strategy thinking (the case of Ingredient A at the Rock Path?) By the way, Question 4: Where are we going to encounter the different type of critters?Basically, the Slime ones?
2. I guess another ingredient (B?) is going to be obtained after an environmental puzzle (pretty obvious from the Forest Maze)
3. Another one could be by observation (ingredient C at Beach?) or
4. by figuring out the right NPC that can help you (ingredient D in Town). Somehow.(How?)

In general the game seems to revolve around 3 main tasks that can be achieved through a variety of steps (summarizing what I understand so far):
TASK 1: Get recipe – We could either find it from an NPC or find it somewhere hidden or written.
TASK 2: Get ingredient – Multiple ways: From NPC, from finding something hidden, as a droppable from critters/when you hit a tree or bush(?)/smash a barrel, from actions such as cooking or trading even(implicit mission).
Question 5: Are we considering adding other “actions” (such as milling(?)/planting(?)) just for the action of figuring out how to make something new out of an ingredient you already have? (like corn->popcorn, wheat->flour, seeds->…?). I understand if that complicates things.
TASK 3: Cook Dish – Either to restore health or to create a sub-dish for the winning dish or as a quest task from an NPC to gain something else in reward.
And then we have other tasks that may or may not be part of a quest such as:
TASK 4: Get a utensil
TASK 5: Get information

Question 6: Are all the NPCs (apart from Bard Hare) that are going to give us our quests going to be encountered in Town? Perhaps we get some information and we find out that one NPC resides in the Forest Maze and we start one quest there.

Here are some thoughts in diagram Mode (based on the official Game Map and that Game Loop), playing around with the semi-linearity of our game and following a structure of Quest->Task->Steps:


PS1: I differentiate the Town from the Festival, because I guess we are going to have some special happenings that are Festival related (those Smaller Events as described in the Story Card) rather than regular Town activities.
PS2: For the tutorial and after some discussions from the Whiteboxing:

• Are we going to explore any kind of attack with our cane at the Beach, and if so what will it be? Like: Smashing barrels, attacking a tree to drop fruits, fighting critters
• Since Hamlet is going to cook a recipe with Bard Hare: Is he going to already carry one, or is this recipe something he should find at the Beach/something that Bard Hare gives to him?

PS3: Any links in the diagrams are random, I just wanted to show how things could be more intertwined. And of course, these are all just suggestions and I am afraid I suggested too much. Anyone is more than welcome to elaborate!

 

There's still a lot of reading to be done, and I have to read this thread one more time before being able to really contribute to the discussion.

But, something I didn't find anywhere is a final boss fight.

I think a boss fight right before preparing the final dish would be a great climax for the game. Storywise it would be a last big obstacle to overcome. In the game design aspect, it would test the skills the player built so far. And, as an educational project (This is the main goal of this project, I think), a boss fight is something very common to implement in a lot of games and a lot can be learned by this kind of task (Art, programming, design, planning).

What do you think?

Maybe, right before preparing the final dish, when the player thinks he figured everything out and is about to complete the game, he discovers there's still an ultimate ingredient or an ultimate utensil (the ultimate divine eternal cooking pot?) that's is guarded by the most dangerous creature in the island. So, without options, the player should go face it in an ultimate showdown (I'll stop using the word "ultimate"). Sounds like a climax for me.

Here's a diagram:



Any thoughts?

 

Per the gameplay card, I’d argue that this is not needed since fighting isn’t the main focal point of this game.

Also, per the story card, this island is only a vertical slice of a bigger game with multiple islands that the player learns about through cutscenes and dialogue, so adding an enemy other than the plant, rock, and slime critters is a big investment.

In my humble opinion, Fry King’s acceptance/rejection of Hamlet’s dish is the final boss fight for this vertical slice since Hamlet will have used all the skills he knows just collecting all the ingredients and the final recipe.

Apologies for the lack of diagrams and bold for emphasis.

 

[QUOTE="shuttle127, post: 6592306, member: 5949624"
In my humble opinion, Fry King’s acceptance/rejection of Hamlet’s dish is the final boss fight for this vertical slice since Hamlet will have used all the skills he knows just collecting all the ingredients and the final recipe.
.[/QUOTE]

Your points are pretty valid. Maybe creating a boss can be something out of the scope of this game.

My strongest point is, I think, that as Unity Open Project is an educational project and boss fights are something very common in many games, a boss fight implementation could be something very useful for the community. And I feel that as we had already implemented a state machine and other tools, maybe this task wouldn't be so heavy.

Also, now that I thought I think maybe this thread ism't the right one for discussing this. I'm very sorry if this is the case.

 

I actually really love the idea for all the reasons you've said, just getting back to what I was doing on the forums a few weeks ago, parroting what Ciro used to remind us a lot about with scope.

Again, I agree that boss fights are part of the game flow, no need to apologize. I do so because of my post history, heh.

If you see my posts, they're almost always ginormous walls of text because I only have a few minutes here and there to communicate and am usually not on an actual computer with programs to make said diagrams (i.e. mobile phone, tablet, etc), so I need to work on that.

What about diagramming a boss fight per area in the game so that what you've suggested is more than just a one-off? Like a rock critter boss on the rock path, a slime critter boss on the beach, and a plant critter boss in the forest/glade? Simply scaling the existing enemies into bigger versions could be fun?

 

Yes, this would be more than enough for this game. Even though they might not behave like a boss (have different attacks, spawn minions, etc), they would feel like a boss just because they're bigger. Yes, I'm up for this.

 

Yes in mmorpgs the boss may not be a colossus but for every species of monster crowds there will be a mini boss which is distinct in colour and spawns at a set number of times in a day and drops rarer items then the crowd and will have higher hp.

Or we could do a single collossus in a cave which drops a recipe that moves hamlet towards fryking faster as attaining that recipe for example rewards him with better utensils to cook faster and more efficiently.

 

I’m not sure cooking is as fun as fighting... are there anymore details how cooking works?

 

I dare say that fighting is such a worn out subject, that it is quite challenging to make something that the player hasn't seen already implemented better in some AAA game.

There is a complete thread discussing the cooking mechanics here:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/cooking-crafting-system-or-gameplay-design.983088/
And a basic version, (I guess so accepted version) is found here:
https://open.codecks.io/unity-open-project-1/decks/65-game-design-wiki/card/17j-cooking

Here is a list of ideas that I identifed in the cooking thread:

1. game progress is represented by unlocking more ingredients,
2. ingredients get categorized/ranked, more valuable/powerful ingredients can be used for more valuable/powerful dishes
3. ingredients can be obtained by defeating enemies, trading or fulfilling quests
4. ingredients get consumed by cooking
   
5. ingredients can be lost by enemies eating/stealing them if you don't defeat them
   
6. utensils can be unlocked, ranked, obtained and lost the same as ingredients in point 1,2,3 and 5, but will not be consumed when cooking
7. cooking can be done like overcooked - the player has to manually place/combine ingredients and use tools to prepare the dish
   
8. Actions with utensils could be delineated by different lengths/different amounts of button presses
   
9. Cooking actions can be done by movement patterns (e.g. up-down = chopping, circle = stirring)
   
10. the phoenix chick is used to heat dishes (by pressing a phoenix chick button)
    
11. during cooking the dish can be tasted (with not all ingredients included and/or not all utensils used yet) to tell the player if the dish can be sucessful (this goes together with 18 or 19)
    
12. dishes can be ingredients to more complex dishes
13. dishes serve as currency - can be traded for recipies, utensils, ingredients or quests
14. dishes heal the player or give him or the phoenix chick extra abilities for some time like e.g invisbility or extra speed
    
15. to defeat enemies, Hamlet must give them their favorite dish (I guess they fall into a food-coma or roll off on their fat belly then ...)
16. a special dish presented to the Legendary Chief wins the game (in my opinion that can't be same dish every time else the game wouldn't be any challenge the second time)
    
17. Hamlet builds a special cooking energy that can be consumed for abilities, to achieve something or as currency like in point 13
18. the player discovers recipies by combining different ingredients and discovering if the dish works or not for one of the purposes from 12 to 16 (if his combination doesn't work the ingredients are lost)
19. like above, but different dishes have different useful and/or funny effects in point 14 and 15 (for example player makes blue puffs now instead of white or e.g. an enemy gets visibly drunk or starts singing or dancing or cartwheeling or explodes or shoots off like a rocket)
20. whether a dish is sucessful and what is does in 18 and 19 comes from some kind of database - the same ingredients lead to the same result every game
    
21. whether a dish is sucessful and what is does in 18 and 19 is determined at random (from a list of possibilites) - it might be something different the next game but can be stored to stay consistent for one game (the combination of ingredients and utensils and potentially what it does might be called a recipy)

With all this ideas I dare say there is definitely enough potential to make cooking more fun than fighting. But it is possibly time to decide what we want to implement and what not. Maybe @ChemaDmk or @cirocontinisio can organize a vote (people vote yes or no for each point, with Unity having a veto) like we did for the name.

 

Nice @Smurjo , that was a good wrap up of all the previous discussions. From the livestreams I got the impression that you “simply” have to find ingredients, utensils, recipes to cook a dish either to restore health or to achieve a reward/make something for the final dish. Everything else that was discussed in these threads could be perhaps added as extras in the future, Unity was pretty open for that, but for the time being I don’t think the voting will help much because we still have to figure out the game in its basic form (around the tasks described above as every other idea was built on top of these).
I don’t mean to discourage anyone from suggestions of course, everyone has their own idea of fun (myself included) but our collective goal should be to end up with a working game that perhaps will not be the game of the year, but it will be complete (that alone is gonna make history regarding the conditions under which this game is made, let's not forget that, it IS the trickiest part). Plus, even after the journey ends anyone could try whatever they want.
So I think that what we need to answer here is mainly how this figuring out of the winning dish will take place as this is our overall goal for this slice. Because even if we settle to ie. 4 quests that need to be completed:

1. How do we communicate to the player that he/she needs to do these 4 quests to complete the game?
2. And how will he/she find out which ones are key characters and which ones are not? Are we going to have huge exclamation marks above key characters? I don’t think so, because it’s pretty clear that this is the main puzzle of the game: talking to characters, taking pieces of information and connecting everything together to figure out the winning dish while enriching our travelling recipe book.

What concerns me even more is the fact that we are so many people here and everyone could propose a different dish – different ingredients that could lead to the winning dish. What @Smurjo wrote as no16 above, actually raises one interesting question: Do we see the game as replayable or is it going to be a one-time only experience? Since it’s a vertical slice I guess in the full game you wouldn’t replay, you would just move forward in the game to the next island. But since we only get to play for like half an hour, is it worth figuring out a way to make this replayable in order to try different dishes that could be made, testing different community proposals? Could the winning dish be something different regarding how you played the game? Perhaps we could give different random rewards, or perhaps the player could pick up a different ingredient from another player as a quest objective, or if he/she decided to do an implicit mission that somebody else did not, they might end up with different utensils – different options.

Because for me, that’s what sets this game apart. It’s not just a game about “a pig who is a chef who travels the world and cooks” but rather a game that is about “a community of people who gathered together online and actually made a game about a pig chef!” Perhaps it’s worth making the variety of contributions part of the game flow somehow (regarding different quests/ingredients/dishes that we could include).

PS: I guess its fine to discuss without posting diagrams, discussions will lead to them eventually!

 

@ChemaDmk One thing we could do is that wherever there is an npc we could finish the quest at the npc itself.
For example: We accept the quest from a vendor at the festival. It gets added to our quest log.
The quest is, let's say, to collect 10 chillies.
So when we accept the quest our quest log would show 'Collected Green Chillies 0/10'
and once the quest is done we will see completed appear in the quest log and the npc we took it from will now have a turn in/finish button to end the quest.

 

What a great update Chema, thank you! I am happy with the diagram, it shows very clearly the flow of the actions and what is done where and with whom and the legend is helpful as well.

Ciro mentioned something in the last livestream which I wanted to give a big thumbs up here: Keeping some footage from these conversations I know you have a LOT in your mind, but in the long-run these will be pure gold. Both for you as a nice record to have but also for the community/outsiders who - I am pretty sure- would like to get a glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes. I mean if I was a documentarist living in Copenhagen I would have definitely reached out to you (and inevitably rock Sundance altogether, for sure) but oh well, I tick neither boxes Anyway, just wanted to put it out there amidst all the crazy piles of threads and PRs, the (hi)story of making the game is definitely surpassing what is being made, in a very unprecedented way. Just giving a little acknowledgment for that!

 

I wonder if we could have each dish have a little puzzle on how to cook it. For example if the bingo fruit is heated to 500 degrees it will release the essence of the flavor, and you have to figure that out.
Also I think one possible problem that I notice is that this game is assembled with plans and graphics etc. But I think that would be the best way to build a product and not necessarily a game... we have to put "fun" at the center of the game. You could build a game with perfect graphics and gameflow but it wouldn't be any fun.

 

That's perfectly fine for this little game demo. If we had to really make it fun, we'd have to spend 3 times the time in prototyping and validating all the design ideas. We unfortunately don't have time for that, given also that the distributed, community-driven development adds work on top. Plus, the fancier we go, the harder it would be to all agree on what's fun. It's a recipe for disaster and scope creep

That's why we're trying to keep it simple for now, at least until "release". Happy to see some little modifications once we're there, but we need to get there first.

 

@cirocontinisio can we experiment with virtual villagers style puzzle system?

 

What do you mean by "virtual villagers"?

 

@cirocontinisio I meant these games
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Villagers.
They are old but I just learnt they released for android and ios in 2017 as well.