Culinary Crashout

Team Size: 5

Allocated Time: 3 Weeks

Blurb:

The kitchen’s open for the night, and the main item on the menu is fun! Join us for an exclusive soirée where only the finest chefs of ΦΔΨ are invited. No need to bring any ingredients or equipment, we’ve got that covered! Just bring yourself, your appetite for good times, and your chef’s hat—because this party is going to be served chef’s special style!

Goals:

• To merge the two board games Cooking Champion and Rush
• To have a series of recipes that players can follow to create foods and drinks.
• To categorically sort ingredients necessary to cook.
• To incorporate a loose economic system.
  • Players should be able to trade ingredients with each other.
    • Players should have full agency over how to bargain with each other.
• To have a player board to keep track of consciousness.
• To create 3D printed models of ingredients and further props.
• To theme around a fraternity cooking party.
• To create a fast-paced environment that will mimic the negative hazing rituals of real-life fraternities.
• Gameplay should center around action cards.

Responsibilities:

• Primary:
  • Gameplay mechanics and system
  • Card designs
  • Rule writing
• Secondary:
  • Board designs
  • Prototyping

Overall evaluation:

Culinary Crashout originally started out as an evolution of two different games: Rush and Cooking Champion, where Rush educationally dealt with themes of fast-paced consumption of alcohol and drugs, and Cooking Champion dealt with themes of cooking and economic management of a festival stall. In a bid to combine the two, Culinary Crashout is set sometime in the future, where chefs of a fraternity house come together to test their cooking skills, create and break alliances, and ultimately prove their mettle in staying conscious throughout the night.

Building upon the consciousness meter in the game Rush, the total level of consciousness points were reduced in order to increase the speed of resolving the game, as well as incorporating a vomit system, whereby players who are attacked too often may have a small period of reprieve and heal themselves. However, players have noted that the game time feels too short at this point and so the total amount needs further tweaking and playtests.  The game fundamentally functions on the consciousness meter, where players can now use ingredients to create recipes of both foods and drinks in order to heal and damage other players respectively by targeting consciousness.

To further articulate the setting, 3D models of the ingredients were created and printed out, so that players could more accurately picture the game world. An additional high effort was put into glossing and painting these models so that it would feel good for players to utilize them, and indeed it was observed during playtests that players increasingly fiddled around and played around with these models during various points of the game, including bits of downtime.

The core loop of the game revolved around cooking up foods and drinks through ingredients, and playing them alongside substances against each other, in order to become the last person still conscious. This was overall in reflection to the theme of substance consumption and the often extremely harmful hazing initiation practices in fraternities and sororities. While originally, all the cards had relevant real-life details about the effects of each substance, they were eventually removed due to taking up too much space, however, they may be reintegrated upon rewording edits. The integration of a trade system was taken from Cooking Champion, but due to the relevant balancing tweaks to the game and the shared recipe cards, players were not incredibly incentivized to initiate trade, except for the sole purpose of creating alliances, which eventually degraded as the game progressed, which fit the themes of betrayal and fake, almost bought friendships that are reminiscent of real life fraternity houses. However, despite this, players have reported that it did not feel balanced regardless. Thus, while the themes we set out to engage with were touched upon, the trade system still needs additional balancing so that it is more interesting for players to plan and trade.