What a weekend it was, my first time participating in Ludum Dare, and I ended up with a game I am personally very proud of. Meet Crampy Kitchen. The goal is simple, throw ingredients into the pot to finish the soup for your customers. While only having a limited amount of space in your restaurant.

Play the game here!

Many things were learned from this project, and I had gotten some valuable feedback from many on the game. For example, on the janky movement. Going in I knew it was janky, but I didn’t realize how frustrating some of the bugs might be for players who didn’t know how to avoid them. For example, ingredients getting stuck on the pot or on the shelves like in the screenshot below. (image made by @LCstark)

Did you know that the bug used to be even worse, it would also start moving the pot originally. Though I made it slightly less frustrating by making the pot not movable at all.

The big lesson from the movement bugs, put more time into making the movement bug free.

Next lesson, Audio. Overall, the feedback on the audio was mixed, which again was thanks to bugs. Depending on how you would throw ingredients into the pot they could keep moving in there and the collision sounds would keep playing. Preventing this from happening I think would have greatly improved the experience.

Game mechanics wise there were also lessons to be made, the garbage can mechanic caused some troubles for players. I think either because of the tip screen at the start wasn’t clear (and wasn’t accessible anymore after, thanks @LCStark for the feedback!). But another great idea was given by @Aeriel as well, where ingredients that had fallen would disappear after some time. Something I will experiment with at some point.

That was of course the feedback on everything that could be improved. I also had gotten many positives comments about general audio design, being able to capture the hecticness of a kitchen, and even the graphics which while rudimentary gave the game a certain charm and it was very inspiring to hear!

What is next then? The plan will be the incorporate the feedback I have gotten from ludum dare into polishing up crampy kitchen. But before that I am planning to entangle some of the code written which with the time constraints became a bit of a hackjob sometimes. But once that is done, create a final version of crampy kitchen with all the feedback to fix the bugs, adjust the movement and make it an overall better experience. This version would stay free and available for everyone for as long as I can find somewhere to host it(and I don’t forget to reupload it if itch.io/github ever goes down). Once this is done, I think the plan will be start turning it into a full fledged game. The core gamplay loop of throwing ingredients into the pot to cook will stay. But, further levels would expand on it. The challenges of the different kitchens will change, and plenty more ideas are floating around in my mind. However, working on that is still quite far off, and I first want to nicely wrap up crampy kitchen such that it can serve as a foundation for this future game if I ever would end up finishing it.