I know I've probably talked about this before somewhere on one of our discord servers, or at least repeatedly alluded to some ideal video game- and it's true, I have many ideas for such a thing, but this one seems the most like one that could actually happen someday. Apologies if the beginning and end feel tacked on, this wasn't originally meant to be a post as much as something I just wrote to myself to massage my brain, but I feel like it would be pretty funny if other people read it, so here it is now. Allow me to introduce you to way too many words about the most awesome game that will probably never be made.
The game begins like this: You build a restaurant. Ideally, you could get really strange with this. It would probably take a million dollars, but a sims-3 level of customization would be best. If you want a tiki bar on an island, this can be done. It doesn't matter if you want a ritzy vegas delicatessen, or a boat-restaurant, theme park pirate shanty, the fancy refreshments bar on a train car, a lone grill kiosk at a chinese wet market, a cozy pancake house or a shady Half-Life-2-lookin' basement business where the russian mafia comes to buy cheburek. This should all be roughly possible within the system using a little imagination.
It also means a lot of furniture that would seem irrelevant to food should also be included: Such as bowling alleys, swimming pools, arcade machines, fountains, mcdonalds play-places, TVs, computers, Medieval Times jousting areas, and hotel beds. Any other stuff that's interactible in small ways and adds to the atmosphere of what this place you're making food at is supposed to be. You should also be able to sort of create and enforce dress codes in order to keep up the immersion of the place you're making. Can't have people in modern streetclothes showing up and ruining your prison cafeteria, pirate tavern, ancient roman snail stand, one of those ancient chinese restaurants where kung fu masters keep pissing each other off and breaking all the benches, etc.
Most importantly, you'll be deciding the layout of your kitchen(s), and all the equipment in them. Do you want to do flashy stuff on a hibachi grill? That'll be available. Anything from mixing drinks to baking pies and pastries to put in your diner display case.
I've never really been a fan of purely physics-based cooking. I admire the freedom it presents, but I just don't think it's been mastered in any medium. It's very hard to make anything look truly good when what the dev team could render is so limitted by them having to make sure everything stays consistent when the food is thrown, spilled, dropped, etc. And you're always one collision error away from losing it all against your will anyway. In this way, I think that the Papa's [food]eria series had the best philosophy. Instead, food will not be created just by janky game physics, but by minigames. You'll be able to create far more elaborate things and customize a lot more when you're not cutting and seasoning blank template models, but sort of picking and mixing bits of completed artwork with cooking minigames in between.
Food will be fixed to the surface you're working on it from, and your ingredients will be limitted only by what you have in your inventory. If you ever wanted to make blue waffles by adding windex to the mixture, now you can! In fact, you always could do that, even in real life, but now you can do it for free! And I do mean every ingredient in your inventory should be applicable to the minigame. That pie you just lovingly constructed piece by piece? You should also be able to put it on top of one pancake and then stack others on top of it. You should be able to refill the cola tank at your fountain drink machine with salty molten garlic butter and have it pour into your customer's glasses. You can make risotto and ice cream at their respective stations, and serve both of them on toast.
Physics will only affect the food if thrown intentionally. There will be a whole throwing button reasonably far away from the other ones, with different degrees of force. Because if there's one thing I've learned from Gordon Ramsay, as well as any movie about deeply passionate chefs, it's that the highest culinary excellence can only come from physical and psychological torment. When you eventually hire staff members to work at these stations and recreate your recipes, you can scream into your microphone and throw things in order to keep their discipline high. (It will degrade over time at different speeds depending on the quality of the employee.) You can also inspect the recipes at different stages and give the cooks arbitrary demands that will change the result, sort of allowing you to edit your recipes on the fly without needing to make and save the whole dish again. But also giving you an excuse to throw the all their hard work in their face and then cause them to panic-slip and fall on the electric range. Like Darkest Dungeon, your actions will either break them, or inspire them to perform at superhuman levels before physically expiring in a blaze of artistic glory.
There will be other ways to restore morale and discipline, like having training courses or sending your employees on vacation, but those are for people who play cooking games the "right" way, and I'm not about that life. People who play cooking games to follow recipes have a morbid condition. If I wanted to follow a recipe for my own enjoyment, I'd cook food in real life. And I'm a roughly 140 pound man as of writing this, so you should know how rarely I feel that feeling. I want there to be a cooking game that will reward you for doing it wrong. I want a cooking game with moral choices. The choice between rigorous order based on management skill, versus controlled chaos based on passion and willingness to commit mayhem in order to complete the task at hand. The choice that real chefs (presumably) make every time they put on their toque in the morning. Now players will feel that same pressure and react to it in ways that fit only their own nueroses.
I want there to be character customization. It doesn't have to be WWE 2K20 level, but everybody should be able to create very distinctive characters. I should be able to recognize my chef's face on a billboard, and pick out regulars and esteemed individuals among my customer base. The NPCs should be good, but not too good. In an ideal world they should have that loveable balance that Oblivion characters do: being perfectly in-character with their words and motivations, but have something a little off about their appearance and something deeply retarded about their actions. They should be likeable, but in a way that's stupid and antagonistic enough that it's still funny when terrible things happen. If you pour the mayor of your wild west town a tall cool glass of industrial bleach, he'll smile, thank you, and then, without changing expression, look straight ahead and drink it until he dies a tragic ragdoll death.
If you wind up killing someone, it's your job to either get rid of the body or blame somebody else before the Police Timer goes off. If their relationship with another customer was low enough, you could point the finger at them and get that guy arrested for his convincing motive. But you won't always have a customer to blame (or know that they have a motive in the first place) so unless you want the police to call you on your bullshit and take you to prison, you'll have to point at whoever's working at a station assigned to making the dish that killed them. Be wary, though! The newspaper that publishes critics' reviews of your food will also notify you of prison breaks, where the guys they put away for your crimes might have come to sabotage your restaurant by stealing wet floor signs to trip your customers, or shitting in your cupboards to contaminate your food, among other things. You might have to find and kill them before opening for the day in order to keep them from damaging your business! (killing escaped convicts is usually ruled self defense, but you can never be sure.)
Alternately, you could cut them up or toss them in the meat grinder... And serve them to your customers, hiding the fact that the murder ever happened! Remember, these are like Oblivion NPCs, so they're not very thorough. The first time the police come through, they'll just walk around all the open spaces of your restaurant and kitchen, so as long as you put them in a closed container of some sort, you should be good for the day. But the day after, they'll bring the dogs. Police dogs are highly sensitive to the smell of human flesh, so you'll have to at least have thoroughly seasoned or mixed the meat with something else. Every ingredient/food item has stats attached to it, and if the "human meat smell" gets past a certain threshold, the dogs will smell it, and they'll take the item back to forensics for testing, and you're screwed. The human meat smell gets stronger every day, so you have to make sure to mix it into something quickly and serve it fast. The spices can only mask so much for so long!
And as long as we're on the subject of violence, characters can build up a meter called "outrage" based on their experiences in or around your restaurant. If they're having a bad time, it will build up over time. Or there could be individual moments that wound them psychologically all at once. If they're having a good time and you give them the entirely wrong thing instead of what they ordered, (or you give them some other thing and make it "complimentary" they might still happily eat it no matter how disgusting or terrible it is. If they've already been waiting too long for their order and you give them 2 burnt burgers sandwiching a massive tower of butter squares instead of a fruit crepe, they'll react accordingly with horror, sadness, or rage depending on their personal stats. Because let's face it, not paying attention to whatever somebody ordered and then presenting them with a raw hotdog buried in a glacier of cubed onions was the best part of all those "Papa's x-eria" games. I can only imagine how much more brilliant it would be if you could see the resulting shock and/or grief from your actions. I want to be able to see people having a mental breakdown when they order a burger and find out they've been waiting 3 hours for a hideous glistening beehive made out of stacked american cheese slices.
If customers get too outraged, they might get violent, which is when you may have to beat them with cooking implements and throw things at them, (and other combat mechanics you would otherwise use on your employees) in order to defend yourself. It's not murder if it's in self defense, but the police will get suspicious if you kill more than 3 people a day. (You'll have to hide the body of the fourth one!) People dying in your restaurant will also, obviously, negatively affect the michelin star rating of your restaurant if you care about that sort of thing. That might be something you want, though- It would just be weird and sad for the best hotdog stand in all the land to get all bougie and gentrified and surrounded by hipsters just because critics keep raising the star-level of the place.
Some people might wonder "If food is poisonous, which food is poisonous?" Well, I'm glad you asked. The answer is: Almost everything, if you have enough. Every combination of food adds up the stats of the nutrients of its ingredients. If your dish is profoundly salty, customers might end up self-mummifying as they eat it. If your dish is 50% grease or more, you could give someone a heart attack. Too many almonds might cause cyanide poisoning, too much cheese will constipate someone until they explode outside your restaurant 3 days later, and using the wrong parts of a rhubarb will cause someone to ruin your bathroom.
Dropping food on the floor or storing it without refrigeration will have consequences. If the floor is too dirty, the customer who eats floor food might get botulism, if the floor is too clean, the customer might be poisoned by the chemicals you used to sterilize it. If you mop up your sink or toilet with a burger patty, there's a good chance that burger is primed and ready to kill a man. If you drop a rat in a deep fryer and decide to add it to your taco meat, somebody could get sick. Health inspectors might come by once or twice a month to make sure your practices are clean and that you don't serve things like ratburgers, endangered panda meat, ortolan buntings, and aerosol cheese mountains, but you can avoid them with murder, bribery, hiding all the evidence on inspection day, or just building the place in such a way that the place where everything degenerate happens is inaccessible to most NPCs.
Again, some players will play this like a normal restaurant game, and I'm sure they'll be rewarded too. I'm not sure if the money to progress with the game itself is enough of a reward for them because I really don't know what planet the recipe-followers live on, (except maybe Germany) but while it seems fairly straightforward to make that "normal restaurant game" a reality, I want a game that rewards creation and application of the toilet bowl hepatitus burger instead of one that just condones my actions when I'm in free-play.
Critics will also arrive to come critique your restaurant, and they will expect the highest standard of service and atmosphere. There are many different archetypes- The unbearable hipster who's looking for low-budget dives to be the one who "discovers" the hot new thing in food. The flambouyant carnivore in a bowling shirt who seeks nothing more than nirvana through barbecue. The snooty suitman who values only fine dining. The social media influencer looking for anything weird or pretty enough to take a picture of. You'll be able to keep up with these characters on the news, and articles in the food section will contain dwarf-fortressy semi-random-generated summaries of what they thought of their last experiences there, with some less cryptic mentions of negative and positive moodlets they had while visitting.
These folks will visit often, late in the day, and their opinion will majorly contribute to how many new people come to your restaurant. Their relationship with you and their opinion of the time they spent here will affect their scores. And if you get a high enough score from enough critics, you'll attract a Supercritic who has the authority to raise your Michelin Star Level.
Of course, with critics come ways to cheat the system. Lazy people will bribe them, others will just try their best to make sure that one guy gets much better service than everybody else. But noble-hearted critics will try and wear disguises to circumvent this. That's why you have to be aware of the critic scene at all times so that you'll recognize people when they wear ski masks and fake mustaches. Or don't, just kill the critics like everybody else. People will still show up as long as you're not in prison!
Gamemodes:
Free-style/Old Fashioned: There is no menu, customers make orders with the expectation that they'll recieve whatever the house dish is today. You'll have to eventually learn your customers' preferences based on their reactions and plan your dishes ahead to maximize (or minimize) customer satisfaction.
Escoffier Mode: You make dishes ahead of time to create recipes, and these recipes will be on a menu. Customers won't be disappointed by what you hand them because they know what they're ordering (though will be very unpleasantly surprised if what you give them is significantly different than the recipe.) NPCs with certain preferences may make custom orders, asking for food with or without certain ingredients. Some of them are just ordering on preference and will only get annoyed if you go against their wishes. Other people have allergies and will puke all over the place and/or die if you decide not to take the tomatoes out of the burger. Some people will lie about having allergies just so you take their order seriously. You'll get bonus money for somehow catching them in the lie and pelting them with plates.
Fooderia mode: In the style of the games that inspired this. Your restaurant makes only one type of food, and all the customers are persnickety jackasses who will make requests for individual ingredients being incorporated into them. Pancake house? Hope you're in the mood to make them with walnut flour, chocolate chips, and butterscotch sauce or the guy who ordered it won't be happy. Playing the game the right way here will be painfully anal, but at the same time, it'll be so much fun to do things wrong in order to spite your customers.
Catering Mode: You have to make a large amount of food at the beginning of your mission and drive it to pre-built locations for big parties, wakes, and, weddings. You'll have to build the wedding cake and whatever they might have ordered and set it all up at a sort of buffet table for the partygoers to serve themselves. Depending on how involved you'd like to be, you can also have a hand in other aspects of party planning, like decoration, the amount of courses and the schedule that the party will have, entertainment, etc. But of course, this will also give you tremendous power to make these highly formal events, either the best or worst days of people's lives. Imagine an excited blushing bride and groom cutting open their cake only to find out it's just a fondant shell containing only marmite. And then all their guests start simultaneously vomitting on each other from the slow-acting effects of salmonella.
Zombie Mode: This one is best for multiplayer. Hordes of undead customers will arrive at once. Zombies have no concept of taste, they only want food that looks like it's a complete meal. Their outrage bars are contagious (zombies with low outrage will slowly get as mad as the most angry zombie near them) and they are ravenously hungry. You have an even shorter time to finish your recipes, but they are very punctual and will all immediately leave at closing time. Avoid pissing them off, or you'll have to battle the horde! Alternately, sneak a lot of poison and bacteria into your dish, and poison them all to death one by one!... Just don't step in all the puke, it's highly damaging to your health.
Online Mode: This is the big one. The thing that elevates this idea from a top-tier singleplayer experience to potentially one of the greatest games of all time. Players will build a restaurant and, with certain options (like whether other players are allowed to work in the kitchen or start fights with NPC customers) can put their restaurants up in a server lobby.
Each restaurant will have its own little page you can open up displaying an image of the restaurant and maybe some of the dishes. There will also be a bunch of player reviews, (with a notification next to the name if the player died during their time here) which players can leave describing their time at this restaurant. The reviews do nothing except provide the chef with a reaction for all their hard work providing their experience and give the player some point rewards of some kind in their own game. You will not be able to sort servers by "best reviewed" and "worst reviewed" because that would force people to moderate in order to prevent review bombs, and it would encourage people to review the server rather than their service, which goes against the point entirely because reviews in this game are meant to be in-character responses that paint an illustrious picture of what the restaurant experience will be like.
If people are going on at length about what a pleasant time they had, or talking about what they imagine the taste will be like, or that they had an argument with the chef about strongly held olive opinions, it gives you an idea that the restaurant might be relatively normal. If you get a review written by Brick Stamos III (deceased) saying, "The lobster was alive and literally killed me. They only painted it red to look like it was cooked, and when I tried to eat it it cut my fucking hand off. 6/10", that also says something about the experience of going there.
Servers should never be organized by "Best reviewed" because I don't want the heinously anal autists who insist on running efficient restaurants to have some kind of validation that they're playing the game the "right" way. And they should never be organized by "Worst reviewed" because that's only going to create this genre of people who try and make every facet of their restaurant as annoying as possible at the expense of giving it an actual character. Reviews shouldn't be marks of quality but rather hints at the experience, which chefs can clear or delete as necessary because I feel like it would really start sucking if anything resembling your average discord moderators got ahold of that system.
Servers must be small to keep the weird playerbase monopolies and social hierarchies of 'serious roleplayers' that sort of ruined GMod RP from happening. And moreoever, outside of special gamemodes, the interaction should be fairly fluid from when you plug your restaurant into the internet to when you're offline. Players should be able to come on and chat with all the other NPCs who come to give you patronage. I don't want the online thing to become a game of everyone goes to "the" restaurant, I want it to sort of be like stopping at a strange town in the middle of the night and having to pick where you're going to go for dinner. The names will all be weird depending on who's on, you only really have people's reviews to go on. You can search for your steam friends' restaurants if any are online, but for the most part, it should be the food wild west, with customers exploring new places depending on their region and the time of day different players are awake. Sure, there might be extremely serious people there, but imagine the satisfaction of serving them a pie crust that they cut open to reveal that its filling is 95% pickle relish. Imagine the joy of insistently ordering something like roast panda from a devoutly above-board RP stickler.
I think that's a magical and wondrous feeling. Exploring the bizarre and beautiful visions of strangers, whether they're actually really good or really terrible restaurants. Maybe I'd like to explore the weird coffee shop wizard tower somebody set up, or go to a place that tries to actually serve physically edible and non-poisonous ratburger. I want to see the schemes and architecture people come up with, present my own, and hang out in strange places across time periods and worldbuilding whether that worldbuilding is ultimately a shitpost or not.
Anyway that's like 30 morbidly obese paragraphs. Probably will be more paragraphs than that if I decide to separate them out more later. But I decided to post this now because that's all I have and I can't think of a good closer for this at 3 AM. Do you guys have any overambitious video games that you really wish were made?
