Developing the Cooking System

In any case, it’s well past time for another blog post! Last time, I took a look at the design of the thief minigame. This month Innkeep is joining in on Raw Fury’s Global Foodie Faire, so it felt like a good time to take a closer look at the cooking system.

Where to put the Kitchen?

From the beginning of this game’s very long development history, I knew that I wanted to have a kitchen where the player could cook things. The question was where to put it. The initial main play space was taken up by the commonroom, and the connected bedrooms.

The answer seemed to be that we needed to go downwards, having the camera drop, and fading in new floors and walls. Initially I positioned it directly below the bar, but then decided I wanted space for a large stables, and moved it off to the left.

This turned out to be a big mistake, as while the player needs to go in and out of the kitchen a lot, the corner positioning required the camera to move diagonally, which felt uncomfortable when repeated a lot. So at some point I had to bit the bullet, scrap that approach, and position it back in the center.

(A nice clean vertical transition. Ahh.)

Initial Concept

With the kitchen in, the next job was to prototype how cooking would actually work (Note: a better approach would have been to prototype this when the game was in a much earlier state of course! But I digress.) As I’ve talked about elsewhere in these blog posts, part of Innkeep’s design ethos is making things feel tactile. Rather than interacting with the game space via more abstract UI elements like menus or buttons, as much as possible we prioritize having the player actually grabbing and interacting with things. For example, when you want to move a barrel from one place to another, you actually grab it and walk about with it.

When approaching how to design the cooking system, the one thing I knew is that I wanted to keep it in line with this tactile ethos. But in order to see what we are doing, we would need to zoom things in a little. Keep in mind, this was before the thief minigame looked like it does today! Until this point there was nothing in Innkeep that had this kind of “zoomed in” GUI look.

The initial sketch of the system I did while sitting in a pub one day doing some beer related “research”.

(Yes, my handwriting really does look this bad.)

The basic idea was that when interacting with the kitchen table, a “zoomed in” view would appear, where we could interact with things closer up in a similarly tactile fashion. There are a few games which do this kind of tactile crafting now (Potion Craft, for example), but circa 2021 there were fewer, and I hadn’t played any. So I just tried to figure things out from basic principles.

I knew we needed some inputs (ingredients), a place where you break them down via chopping, or combine them with mixing (the work surface, or chopping block), and some kind of output (like a cauldron, or a pie tin). Combining different things in different ways would get you different results, but it was all conveyed in an intuitive way, with minimal abstract iconography.

Prototyping

After sketching out this idea, the