Kitchen Kauldron is a gamified food truck immersive experience inspired by the zaniness and premise of Overcooked. This experience utilizes themed alternative controllers that enhance the player experience.
Join Wendy the Witch's crew in three different roles as a chef, barista, or server and help turn this struggling magical food business venture around as you embark through a gamified food truck experience.
Role
Technical Game Designer
Duration
10/2021 - 12/2021
Tools
Unity, C#, Blender
Game Design
Station Overview
Server Station
Divinate customers orders using a crystal ball and serve orders to bring in the money.
Systems Design
Core Gameplay Loops
Game Connectivity Systems Diagram
Responsibilities
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Co-designed Game Station Connectivity across the three gameplay stations
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Documentation of Game Systems and Gameplay Loops
Server Station GDD
Technical Design
Server Station
Responsibilities
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Managed and balanced all system tunings, including the difficulty ramps and reward systems
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Designed and developed Server Game Systems
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Gameplay polish and balance of Server Game Systems from customer Spawn rate to Food / Drink Spawn
Gameplay
The Server's gameplay loop is revealing customers thoughts with a crystal ball, serving the right orders on time while managing the customer patience and relaying the orders to the barista and chef to concoct, and brought to life with the inclusion of physical controllers.
The Server game's difficulty also scales up and down relative to the level players are within the experience, as successful player mastery of the stations will coincide with the difficulty ramp.
Crystal Ball Alternative Controller
Server Ideation
The difficulty ramp designed was intended to test player mastery and team synergy as orders became more frequent and customers less patient during fast-paced gameplay.
In order to prevent bottlenecking of orders coming in too quickly or too slowly, I designed and developed the difficulty ramp; the difficulty would change the levels and cast of characters the players would encounter at the end of each round, as well as increase the frequency of food and drink orders in tandem as the chef and barista player's skill mastery would rise as well as coinciding with the game's overall story progression.
Difficulty Ramping
With one of the main pillars of Kitchen Kauldron heralding the importance of communication amongst all players, I had also worked on the communication amongst the various stations alongside one of the other designers, to be able to get all of our individual prototypes working in tandem with one another, to fully create the experience of working in a hectic kitchen and sell the player fantasy.
One of the additional goals of syncing up the games with each other was to ensure that the Server Role, which acts as the communicator between the customers and the Barista and Chef, would be able to properly execute their role in being able to serve customers and feel the relief of a job well done as the piggy bank makes a cha-ching to let Wendy the Witch know her business is booming.
Station Connectivity
Technical Art
3D Modeling and Texturing
Examples of some 3D Assets modeled and textured in Blender
I was also responsible for UV, modeling, and texturing of various food items seen in the Chef Station.
Fabrication
IRL Set Dressing
Kitchen Kauldron Immersive Trailer Fabrication Photos
Working with all the members of the Kitchen Kauldron team, I had also helped out with fabrication of the trailer! Being a small team with limited resources, we had the option of leaving our game prototypes as is without housing, but wanting to fully create a truly immersive experience, we scrapped together to convert an old trailer into our real life Kitchen Kauldron creating real life props of in-game assets to decorate as well as some haphazardous combining of found objects to make a hectic kitchen for players to be ordered around by Wendy the Witch as they went on their magical food journey.
We later went on to tow around the trailer to events such as Two Bit Circus' Beta Night, 2022 Indiecade, and winning alt.ctrl GDC 2023!
Responsibilities
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Demolition of old Trailer Interior
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Interior / Exterior Set Decoration
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Collection / Creation of Props
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Assistance with wiring alternative controls