Writeup from making Delve

So, I’m working on a quick jam game and today I found myself absolutely bogged down trying to make a cooking minigame. I couldn’t develop the code well and the design was clunky and then I had this thought: what if I pivot into the clunky design to enhance the narrative? My game is, overall, about the story (point and click Twine game).So instead of trying to chug through and build a slick UI-based design for the minigame with timers and all that, I’ve focused on the narrative of being a line cook and the stress of incoming orders…I just decided to let the play experience be overwhelmed. The code became much more simple and the player instead deals with an increasingly impossible task of fulfilling those orders and gets narrative breakpoints every now and then based on their order backlog to enhance the frustration of being unable to complete the mechanic.

Basically the player has to pick a dish to cook based on a cooking surface (baked foods used the oven, fried food uses the fryer) and each food takes x amount of time to cook. I decided to just give the player a new food order every round, with cooking time set to multiple rounds, and when the orders reach a certain number they get a cutscene about how frustrating and unfair it is – my game is about the stress of jobs and working, so this ties back well to our core subtext.Now the player advances to the next round through being overloaded, which puts the emphasis on stress and frustration. The overall game experience, through a flawed minigame they can’t win, conveys the emotions I want for this chapter, and I’m able to make a quicker bit of code.

Where have you pivoted design in similar ways to work with code or enhance narrative?