Butterball Buffet: A Twine game that really shouldn't be a Twine game

Gain Jam Gain Jam 9/2021
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“After years of experimental cooking and odd jobs, you’re finally ready to open your own restaurant. Only problem is, you’ve never been to this town before, and the locals don’t seem too friendly. Maybe they’ll warm up to you with some good food…? You’ll have to be quick, though! The Halloween festival is in six days, and you have a feeling something big’s going to happen…”

Hello to the first game I’ve ever completed! Its been a long journey with a bit of crunch involved, but I’m pumped to finally have something out after years of putting together games just to give up on them. It’s nothing exciting, and due to the limitations of Twine sorta buggy, but I’m glad to have joined the competition! I hope you have fun playing my game, and if there are any issues (bugs, balance tweaks, etc), please let me know!

The gameplay loop revolves around cooking food to put in a buffet booth. The food you put in this booth will influence what the patrons eat; higher-tier foods may entice the patron to overeat or visit your restaurant more often. (From my understanding, this fits in with the “hands off” theme as being interaction via environment. The player does not directly serve the customer, but rather modifies the environment, which in turn influences the customers). Money earned from patrons goes towards upgrading your store, allowing you to cook more and better meals, and to host more patrons at a time. Make sure to seat and feed your patrons before they get upset (roughly 30 seconds)! You must balance time you spend cooking in order to make sure that patrons have food to eat and places to sit.

Due to the horrid spaghetti code I had to vomit out in order to get this finished on time, support won’t last long after the end of the Jam, but I’ll still do my best to fix any glaring issues :] thank you, and good luck with your burgeoning restaurant!

Disclaimer: Due to technological limitations with Twine, this game only has assured compatibility in chromium-based browsers. It was built and tested on a 16:9 1080p screen, and sizes any larger or smaller than that may cause issues. Please make sure your browser zoom is at 100%. I am aware that sprites flash (again, Twine limitation), and if you move too fast, the tilemap won’t update until you stop moving. I did my best to mitigate all these issues, though they still remain in some capacity. You may also experience stutters or jitters as you play, as at the end of the day, Twine wasn’t built for this kind of game. I intend to use Godot in the future!

Known bugs:

  • Patrons still get stuck in chairs. For a fat game this may not seem like a bug, so treat it like a feature ahahah! In all seriousness, I have no idea what’s causing this; it’s probably just some issue with JS’s “general funkiness” or perhaps just a browser limitation. AKA: I want to think it’s not my fault :sweat_smile:

  • If your browser lacks enough memory, it will probably crash.

Includes:

  • Six 2-minute days (a roughly 15 minute experience)

  • Tile-based gameplay typically not seen in Twine games

  • Original pixel art by @Bellybelting (huge thanks, wouldn’t’ve been possible without them)

  • Original writing by yours truly!

  • Music & SFX

  • Six unique patrons, three weight stages each

  • 10 unique recipes

  • Recipe crafting/experimentation system to unlock those

  • Semi-in-depth cooking system w/ recipe book

  • Store upgrades

  • Ingame tutorial

  • Fast paced & semi-balanced gameplay

  • 3 unique endings based on customers’ accumulated happiness score

  • Mild nudity (no nsfw content, but one character lacks clothes by design)

  • Concentrated essence of two weeks’ effort (mild “pain” flavour)

Character credits

  • Mint from me!
  • Garret from belly_gurgles on Twitter
  • Birby from BirbyFluffy on Twitter
  • Creme from DemonsDelights_ on Twitter
  • Ellis from KantusPaints on Twitter
  • Okui frog from Bellybelting

Controls:

WASD to move

Move into tiles in order to interact with them (e.g move into a patron tile to lead them; move into a table tile to seat them).

Downloads:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10xBIWXDznIhlj8n6Wzf46zWnOEzPGwXM/view?usp=sharing

Itch link (if you prefer to tip or if Drive is broken): Butterball Buffet by BellyBelting

(Permission to add the Itch link post-deadline was given by Grot)

27 Likes
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Ingame tutorial transcript
(provided upon request)

Welcome to Butterball Buffet. This tutorial should help you get started.

It costs nothing to cook. To start making a meal, head into the kitchen in the upper right by moving to the right on the mat.

Grab a basic meal from the fridge by moving into it; it’s the only thing you know how to cook right now.

Put the basic meal in the oven and wait for it to finish.

Move into the oven to grab the meal again, then head back out into the dining area.

Patrons will grab meals on their own, you just need to bring them to the buffet. Some patrons have favourite meals which reward more score. Move into the buffet and add your food.

Speaking of patrons, looks like you have one in line! ‘‘Lead them to a table by moving into their sprite, and then moving into a table.’’ Be careful–if you have no tables open, you’ll have to wait!

Be careful not to let patrons wait too long, or else they’ll get impatient and leave! This has been disabled for the tutorial.

If you’ve done everything right, your patron should grab a meal and get to work! On occasion, if they are not full, they will grab another meal

If you’re curious about the status of your patrons, you can check them at any time using the menu on the right!

Congratulations on finishing your first day! This screen will show you how you did, as well as give you hints to potential recipes and your score.

To purchase new furniture, visit Fortified Furnishings. To learn new recipes, experiment in the Calorie Cookery.

Good luck, and have fun!

Helpful tips:

Always keep the buffet stocked with a few basic meals before moving onto better meals

Ovens can only cook one meal at a time (e.g one frozen meal), but can accept multiple ingredients to create one meal (e.g dairy + sugar to make a milkshake)

Patrons may steal another’s favourite food, so make sure to keep a variety of foods in the buffet!

Patrons may leave after you add a food to the buffet; this just means you took too long so the code couldn’t scan the buffet again.

Patrons stop arriving after 100 seconds.

Patron timers reset after they’ve been seated, so it’s best to seat patrons after you’ve prepared a meal for them!

5 Likes
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A new bug has been found, and considering all 3 are tied to the “double eating” system, I’m going to remove it soon.

Also, please post your final scores here for balance reasons!

3 Likes
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UPDATE:

  • Fixed timer not being reset after tutorial
  • Fixed music overlap when in game
  • Added purchase sounds to shop menus
  • Removed double-eating mechanic (hopefully this knocks out 3 bugs in one)
2 Likes
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a pretty solid entry, especially considering that it’s made in twine for some ungodly reason
sprites are pretty cute and the recipe system is certainly interesting
couldve used some more streamlined gameplay but once you get in a rhythm it can make for some hectic fun
solid work!

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WHOO thank god, I was terrified the first comment would be something like “Yo your game’s broke” ahahah. I’m so glad you liked it! (And that it was playable to begin with lol)
Unfortunately yeah, had I had extra time I would’ve streamlined things a bit more, but I still think this isn’t too bad! Fun fact: originally the recipe crafting minigame was going to be an entire farming sim/idle game in the same vain as Cookie Clicker lol

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The image(s) that makes up the entire visible map isn’t loading. only the tutorial text and everything on the menu on the right loads.

…

Never mind. I forgot to take the game out of the .zip.

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very good game only that it makes me a little uncomfortable to handle the character with the letters besides that it is personally somewhat uncomfortable that for each ingredient having to open the refrigerator

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Keeping the fridge menu open was something I was going to program in, but unfortunately didn’t have enough time to :[ sorry if it’s a big issue for you! I’ll definitely keep user controls in mind for any of my future work :]

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It’s not a problem just that my computer is old and my browser is very slow and it takes me a long time to open and close the fridge but I liked it a lot

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I’m so glad you liked it, thank you so much! And yeah, even on my computer the game runs kinda slow. An unfortunate downside of making something this complex with Twine is that you need to have a bunch of redundant and resource-hungry tasks running multiple times a second :[

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An Itch.io link has been added to the post as an alternative method of downloading :] I’ll also post it here for funsies: Butterball Buffet by BellyBelting

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love the sprite work really cute and the fat sprites even cuter i cant play the game wont let me XD when they leave they dont leave. so i can only get a night or 2 and then no more game play xD! but other then that alone witch im not mad made me laugh the game play its self wus quite nice i feel we need more dinner manigment games honistly uwu and i hope to see this become more in the future this would do great this would be the dinner dash for fat furs and such

3 Likes
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Oh? That’s concerning. You’re saying customers will disappear from the “spawned customers” list but won’t actually leave their tables? Huh…I haven’t heard anybody else having issues with that, so maaaybe it’s a browser issue? Sucks, though :[ I’m sorry to hear!

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QUICK DISCLAIMER: If you downloaded the game the instant I posted it, and had issues with patrons not leaving after they ate, you may want to redownload it, as I updated it an hour or so before the Jam ended with a patch that should hopefully have fixed that issue.

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Glitch where patrons didn’t leave is still a thing and i even have one where the patron at the bottom booth doesn’t even eat or at least from what it looks like. But otherwise the concept seems really fun will be watching this one with great interest

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Dang, that’s really unfortunate :[ I’ll have to take a look to see what might be wrong. Tysm!

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i also have this problem, all 3 tables are full. i tried it firefox and chrome and still had the bug. But yea this is definitely an interesting concept

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Damn, it’s terrible to hear that it’s so buggy :[ At the end of the day, I believe this is an issue with Javascript or some other thing that goes way over my head, as the code is written perfectly fine/seems to make logical sense. I’ll definitely have to make this with a proper engine in the future.

2 Likes
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i did have that same issue with the patrons not leaving, although i figured out that only happen if you place a patron at a table post 100 sec on the timer

3 Likes