Viole(n)t Cooking by Shess
"Welcome to Cooking with Violet! Listen, we'll make it this time, I promise. It's a basic stew, how hard can it be? The recipe looks so plain I'm tempted to add a few more ingredients just to spice things up".
Story: it's cooking time! Violet hasn't been too lucky with her culinary exploits lately, not really. Pots blowing up, houses burning down, chthonic interdimensional beings rampaging in the oven... that kind of stuff.
People asked, people begged Violet to stop risking it altogether, or at least consult with a chef's cookbook first, and... she actually complied! But not before introducing a few tiny changes into the recipe. Cooking is art, and all art requires courage!
- Keep your cooking pot stable and balanced!
- Add new ingredients to enhance the taste!
- Avoid overusing any one particular element!
- Complete your dish in just two hellish minutes!
- Play in browser!
Controls: mouse only. Drag-n-drop ingredients from their containers and beds into the pot, and watch the indicator telling you how much Fiber, Protein, Tentacle (yep), Fur and Chitin you currently have.
The pot burns different components at different speeds, so you will have to regularly add new ingredients to keep it stable, and the more ingredients you throw in there, the easier it will become to manage the balance. Don't let any one element pass the 50% mark, but if worse comes to worst, open the cookbook and hit reset in the settings tab.
Additional hints by reading tutorial in-game.
You actually cannot miss it this time, we built it into the narrative itself <(￣︶￣)>
Code: Yanrishatum. Gamedesign, story: Shess. Art: Lolita. Music, SFX: Elvendan.
| in-browser (itch.io) | https://yanrishatum.itch.io/violent-cooking |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/violent-cooking |
Ratings
| Overall | 584th | 3.64⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1022th | 3.169⭐ | 76🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1085th | 2.987⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 542th | 3.757⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 37th | 4.62⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 84th | 4.128⭐ | 76🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 525th | 3.299⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 398th | 3.726⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
I'm not able to do anything once clicking the book (Sometimes it is blank, othertimes it fills out, bit in either case I can't click anything). Everything else in the room is greyed out and unclickable.
Is this a known issue, or is there a way around this? Would love to try the game out if there is.
Great work! Top marks from me.
Awesome work otherwise! :D
The art is really pretty. It's really stylistic and I found it extremely appealing. I also found the gameplay to be smooth, and the game's writing was really funny too. The music was subtle, but very nice as well. Overall though, the biggest thing for me in this game is the art. It's one of the prettiest games I've played so far. Just solid stuff.
Overall it was fun though. I liked it.
The game itself was hectic at first, the pie chart fluctuates way to much and it hard to keep track when i'm initially figuring out what i can interact with AND which type of ingredient they count as, 2 minutes later i'm forcing poor Violet to phase through the kitchen just to keep the balance! Addicting! Good work!
Basically everything about this game is near-perfect. The art and music are amazing, and the gameplay is addictive. Only real nitpick is that it's a bit difficult to figure out which component is where. Also I know the leaf icon doesn't mean "plant/vegetable", but it felt wrong anyway when you're throwing mushrooms in there.
However, the gameplay is very lacking. The pie chart isn't clear and doesn't update instantly, the game becomes easier over time, and we can easily win by spamming random ingredients. The reset button is also hidden inside the book, it should appear on the screen when we lose or be bound to the R key.
They way we decided what ingredient contains what element was a bit random, but... for example, mushrooms are considered to be neither flora no fauna, yet sometimes - sort of both, and this is what we went with.
Also, all things that could even vaguely be connected to tentacles, were.
Made the dish in a few tries. It actually looked yummy!
Not sure about all the slime in it though.
The game is entertaining and enjoyable!
We were literally counting seconds there, no joke.
5/5 Graphics +1
But the gameplay really needs to be improved. It's a bit simple. And during the second half, I didn't add any ingredients, but the cooking dashboard didn't even move. I don't know if it is a bug.
@paul-maxime Pie chart updates near-instantly with some fairly fast lerping, but there is a slight delay between you dropping the ingredient into the pot and it actually being added (it's intentional). I queues the item, and Violet going back and forth is an actual place where it gets added. As for reset, see below.
Because Itch decided to lock out build updates, I was a few minutes late to update the build with some fixes (namely fail state being more obvious as well as some effects that lets you know what objects became interactible). So, no dice here.
Am I missing something obvious?
The gameplay fits the theme.
A more obvious game over screen would be nice, and having to close the cookbook to see the ending is a bit confusing.
Showing icons when you hover over containers would make it easier to understand what each one is for.