Embedded Files
Purpose
The focus of Kitchen & Curses is about going on expeditions, navigating unfamiliar areas, and learning how to deal with unexpected problems. It's what can happen on any hike or backpacking trip, just with a whimsical twist.
Illustrations like these also help find themes, color palettes, art styles, and the general personality of the characters and environment. A lot of answers and identities are found this way.
All my concept illustrations are compiled on Miro. I can group and link sections together to help form complete ideas in a single document. The ones here are a fun selection that communicates the main theme of this project.
Experience Breakdown
The expedition loop is fairly straight-forward: plan your route, prepare, find the ingredients, and return to the kitchen. The difficult part is ingesting the curses. These alter the mechanics players have been getting used to, and always at the furthest point. They need to remember what the journey was like and improvise in order to return back to the kitchen safely.
Additive Complexity
Just running from one spot to another isn't all that intriguing. It won't matter even if the environment is beautifully detailed if the player is bored. So my plan was to have the majority of plants in the world play two roles: look good, and provide new mechanics.
These alter how the player moves, climbs and jumps. Some provide new routes and others make it more difficult. This is why the Plant Spawning Tool is so important. It fills the world with mostly randomized plants, giving the environment a feeling of depth.
Interacting With Plants
This is what provides that feeling of depth. An interactable illustration of a plant (or mushroom) appears, that has multiple parts to pull off. Each part can be either discarded or eaten. Not all plant parts have a dietary effect, but most do. These range from simply hurting the player because of poison, to a tuber being pulled out of the ground that inflates into a large, now rising, balloon. There's a lot of freedom with this concept that can help keep things feeling fresh.
Designing Expeditions
An expedition is a complex combination of choices made by the player. When designing a "route", I make a line for myself to help plan terrain and landmarks, and where to put ingredient spawn zones. When the player eventually looks at their map, there is no line to follow. There will be markers for the spawning zones, but it's up to them to decide the order to find the ingredients. That's part of the puzzle.
Expedition routes are how I plan to fill this world with dense interactions. Even when the player is looking for a selection of ingredients, every plant and animal is spawned. They get to use a variety of dietary effects and curses to aid in traversal, and have to be cautious of animals roaming around.
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