Too Many Cooks! by Bocodillo
STORY:
Those cheeky sous chefs are at it again. Always thinking that they know best. Well they don't. Always recommending stupid ingredients, they should just do their own job and stop pestering you while you cook. You've got critics in tonight too, so don't muck it up!
GAMEPLAY:
Cooks will periodically offer ingredients for your lovely broth. Each ingredient has qualities like: sweet, spice, salt, sour & savoury, that it will add (or take) from the dish. If you don't want the ingredient added though, you can slap 'em upside the head with your spatula by clicking the left mouse button. Your goal is to get a balance of each flavour. Aim to get as many flavour bars as possible within the golden markers & keep them there, to score. Bonuses for getting them right in the middle!
INGREDIENTS:
Pepper (The red thing): ++Spice, +Sweet
Onion (The stripy brown): +Spice, +Savoury
Chocolate (Mmmm, chocolate): ++Sweet, -Savoury
Chicken (Drumstick yeah): ++Savoury, +Salt
Fish (Good source of omega 3!): ++Salt, +Savoury
Potato (The thing that looks like sick, drawing pixel potatoes is hard yo): -EVERYTHING BUT SAVOURY
Lime (It looks green and limey): ++Sour, -Savoury
These have other minor +'s & -'s too but I'll leave to ya'll to figure out!
OTHER INFO:
This game was made using the Unity engine, SunVox (music) & Aseprite (graphics). The font used is pixellari by Zacchary Dempsey-Plante and can be found here.
Ratings
| Overall | 127th | 3.75⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 225th | 3.515⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 46th | 3.922⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 42th | 4.212⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 146th | 3.828⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 181th | 3.359⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 40th | 3.922⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
By they end I was just slapping away sous chefs left and right to try and preserve the broth I had.
The controls could use some work though. I played around with the game and I tried to prevent all chefs from adding stuff but some always came through no matter what I tried. This makes the game very tough to control later on when there is a lot going on. Also, color-coding the food may have helped, as sometimes it's tough to react quickly and figure out the flavor of each food at the same time.
When it comes to audio, I wish you would have opted for a more crunchy slapping sound and maybe a slight screenshake. Slapping the chefs is the core mechanic around which the whole game pivots and I think it may have become much more tangible by adding some more heft to the slaps.
Overall I liked the premise a lot and would return to give it another spin should decide to make a post-compo version.
Overall a great game, the graphics work well and the concept felt original, which I always like
This game is almost complete. The critics part in the end is so immersive that make me want to play it again.
Also massive thanks to the comments so far, I'm doing my best to play all of your games too, and your comments will help me balance & update a post-jam version!
I found the result of your action (or inaction) a bit slow to appear, since it takes some seconds after you choose what to do with an ingredient to see the effect, while there are other decisions to make.
Overall,good work. Would like to see an improved versionof this. ^^
Those nosey little cooks! Leave me alone lol :yum:
It would be great to have feedback when the bars are just right (maybe like a godly "AWWWWW" with the flavour bar when it gets to the "gold zone" score with a shining indication)
For added difficulty it would be great to use the spatula to taste test the broth (you don't know the flavours till you try it, and with each new ingridient added it changed the recipe and you have to taste again!!! :yum:)
If you have the time this would be great in a masterchef kind of style - With scores and rankings depending on AI (There could be a bad chef, decent chef and gordan ramsey) to face off against for each difficulty level and the weakest one gets chucked out of the process!
:yum: Great game!! Thank you for making it!! :yum: