Cook, Kill, Survive. Rethinking Our Gameplay Loop (Devlog 2)

Hi again!

This week the team talked together about how we can format/change our game in a better way to make gameplay more fun and interesting. We've got some nice assets and cool systems but if the gameplay isn't fun, thats no fun :). The team collectively noted that our gameplay felt kind of boring/stale so we thought up some ideas that could in theory make it more fun and also fit into our design pillars (Cook, Kill and survive). The ideas I've listed below may/may not get implemented in the game, depending on playtests and how we feel about them in the future.

Here are the ideas we came up with:

1: Having a ghost system. So when the player poisons a customer, their ghost comes into the kitchen and starts messing around with the player and causing some general havoc. I think this could be a really good way to make the survive pillar more prominent as the added stress the ghosts will put on the player will make surviving harder.

2: A heart/Life system. This is another system thats aiming to improve on the survive design pillar. Basically when the player messes up in some way ( Like through the ghosts) they would lose a heart/life. This mainly integrates with the ghost system, but if we dont do the ghost system this could still exist but instead would be with the player messing up eg, burning a dish, taking too long

3.Hat/Accessory NPC system. This fits in with the design pillar of kill. For this one npcs could be wearing different modular/interchangeable accessories and the prompt of who to kill would include the accessories. Say the prompt would be "The npc who i need you to kill is wearing a top hat" and then only npcs wearing top hats are the kill targets. I think this will add an interesting twist to figuring out who to kill, and seeing the npcs in costumes would be funny.

4:Changing environment when progressing through levels. This is just a visual change so each level can feel different and give a feeling of more progress. The idea is that the kitchen starts of as dirty/run down and it gets more renovated/cleaner as the player progresses. 

5: Adding more combinations for the skewers. This is a cooking design pillar update we want to do, having all the ingredients we have to be able to be mixed and matched into their own combinable skewer recipes. Having more options with this will make it alot easier to have less repetition when it comes to the orders you have to make.

Also, i wanted to show a nice quality-of-life feature that was added. Its a system that highlights what you are interacting with and with this system and the item being shown in a Hotbar ( another quality of life feature we may make in the future)  it will be alot easier to see what your doing. 

Here's an example of what we are aiming at visually for #4 (the dirty/run down version), And the highlight system.

That's it for this devlog , Thanks for reading :)