DINERBOLICAL (v.112)

[Hoodah]

DINERBOLICAL

PUMPCON is proud to release DINERBOLICAL, the devilish mix of Overcooked and Mastermind!

Play as a lowly Bapho-chef and cook up the perfect meal for a cast of hellish characters. Figure out the correct combination of tastes to satisfy even the most heinous of paletes. The better you match, the more your guests can indulge and grow for huge score!

DOWNLOAD

Dinerbolical by pumpcon For Windows clients only

• Extract the .zip file to your preferred folder, and run the exe. Enjoy!

GAMEPLAY

• Make up dishes by using Ingredients, which come in a variety of Flavors, represented by their color.
• Use Appliances like Stoves, Fryers, and the like to combine these ingredients into a final dish, made up of an array of Flavors.
• Serve it up to the Guest and see how well it matches their own Flavor Code. They will give feedback on each Flavor found in the dish.
• Figure out their Flavor Code and you’ll send them into a feeding Frenzy, uncapping their Fullness and giving you more time to feed them before Patience runs out and ends the game.
• Chain Fevers for a high score!

CONTROLS

WASD/Arrow Keys - Movement
Z or LMB - Pick Up/Drop
X - Activate
ESC - Options/Setting Menu

CREDITS

Thanks to the great work our team at PUMPCON did!
Sketch for Programming and Level Design
FaucetRye, Khatoblepas, and Hoodah for art and assets
Foxley for Sound Design
Hooboy for Music

And thanks to Weight Gaming for hosting the Gain Jam this year!

And of course, thanks to players like you.

[Dapk_Macmep]

it’s pretty cute and quite a good project, I honestly don’t really like cooking games, but this is one of the few exceptions

[coldsteelj]

This game is awesome, but I completely don’t understand how to chose right ingredients. Even when there is “correct pip, correct position” NPC can tell me it was incorrect which make no sense for me.

[Enigma_Fleur]

It’s… a little vague, I find myself too confused aside from the very first level.

[AlexKay]

The logic is sound… Perhaps a little too sound as I was playing the first level for close to an hour!

Some logic tips: An X means that ingredient will never appear in the sequence at all; if therefore one of the two colours shows a O, then it will have to be the other ingredient. You can also have sequences just use one ingredient.

Where you have ingredients doubling up on icons, if ary are already in the correct set position they are factored out in relation to other ingredients of the same type. Heres an example of what I mean:

Despite the correctly set pink as the first ingredient, the pink X tells us that there’s no other pinks in the sequence. Likewise, despite the green ingredient correct in #4, the green O tells us that there’s one more green ingredient that isn’t in position #2.

There’s only solution to this with three ingredients (pink, green and yellow) so we should be able to work it out as this:

[coldsteelj]

Your logic tips make no sense too just like tutorial in the game.

Correct Pip, Correct Positiion should mean that I need to use exactly the same ingredients in sequens like NPC requested. For example NPC requested:

And I create a dish with exactly the same ingreadients:

But then NPC just tell me that one of my ingredient was incorrect which makes no sense for me.

[AlexKay]

If you’re seeing all pips filled in on the bottom, that was the previously correct dish. You then have to make a new dish which is completely random.

Each time a dish has been perfected it generates a new sequence. You’re making multiple dishes and not just the same dish over and over.

[coldsteelj]

Oh, now I understand, thanks.

[AlexKay]

I admit this threw me as well at first but I soon found myself in the groove of alternating between making a “sounding dish” for the clues and the correct dish. Rinse and repeat (seemingly forever on the first stage haha)

[Enigma_Fleur]

Oh, no, not the pips.

But moreso the other levels.
For example, everything else aside from the first level.

[Cloudshifter]

This definatelly looks the most complete in design and art direction for this years competition. The game is preety fun and well thought out. It’s got quite alot of replay value and can be challenging.

[Joe_Lama]

this is my favorite one by far! and i love the characters!

[someoneoutthere]

Solid and polished. I can definitely feel the inspiration from Overcooked and Mastermind, and you did a good job of replicating both the feel and the appeal of those games. Good fun overall. Well done!

One minor thing that I think could improve the game would be if the difficulty ramped up as your score climbed higher. As someone else already touched on, it’s entirely possible to keep playing forever on some of the levels. Something like gradually increasing the speed at which the Fever meter drains could be used to put a soft cap on game length.

Although, funnily enough, there actually is something that adds a bit of ramping difficulty on some levels–namely, the characters’ big bellies. They block your view of part of the map when they get big enough. I don’t know if that’s intentional, but it is kind of amusing.

[Moinaushniki]

i spent 20 minutes but the game is impossible

[Kaiser_Dragon]

You guys always make a great team and amazing projects, i can only imagine what you all together could create as a long term project without the time constraints of a jam. For the game, i never tried much of this cooking games but saw some videos, your tutorials helped a lot to understand and after that was trial and error. Had a lot of fun filling the guests, to the point that even at their max size, i would keep pushing more, the comments add a lot to it and their designs are really great too.

For me there are only 2 negatives points, 1 is kinda hot, where the size of the guests belly gets so huge that it starts to cover some of the useful tables to place ingredients, specially for the levels that ask of you to cut them down in different pips, i kinda would say for you to keep it as it is but as for gameplay it kinda makes it even harder for some of the levels. As for 2, altough fever never goes down as it reaches the end, during a meal test, it also doesnt count as a combo, in a 3 pip setting i was able to easily combo as you could find the correct meal quickly but in a 5 pip setting, i would find the correct meal with the fever meter still at a bit less than half but the time it took for each bite of the guest, it would reach 0, fill up again but not count as a combo, i would say you can keep it like that but it feels less fun as the higher difficulty with more pips will mostly be at the mercy of rng.

For tips for the others, what i did to get easier results is just fill an entire meal of the same plate, see whats right or wrong and then start adding a second and then third ingredient. When the guest is tasting the food, if they reply right away its wrong and if they take their time savoring its because its right, so im already at the oven making the new order as they reply.

[HectorCollector]

This is a lot of fun. I enjoyed getting a rhythm down and serving the demons as much as I want.

But I am a little confused where the theme “Push the Limits” comes in. If its in the size of the food, I suppose it makes sense, but that only plays into which difficulty I choose. Higher the difficulty, bigger the food needed and thus slower I get when delivering it. But if I never raise the difficulty, I never encounter the limit nor am I tempted to go for those difficulties to encounter it.

Great game, I found myself too entranced in the loop of keeping the fever going before I realized I’ve been playing for 30min LOL but am not sure if it showcases the theme of this Gain Jam

[Batty]

I thought the showcasing was if you got perfects you could go past their hunger meters and make them larger than usual!
If you don’t get perfects you don’t get to do into fever normally and they don’t actually expand. therefore you don’t get to go ‘beyond’ the scope of what the score could normally be if you just got them full / let their patience run out due to such.

[eman006]

Game is addicting. Takes a min to understand it, but all too easy to get wrapped up playing 20-30 mins at a time once you are in the flow of things.
I would echo what Hector said about the “pushing the limits” thing, basically it feels like there are none. The game would feel more rewarding if you felt like you were stuffing the characters to their limits, but during my playthrough fullness was never an issue. Maybe consider slowing down how fast the fullness meter decreases, that or maybe a soft limit to how full/big they can get until you stuff them multiples times, which could be used to encourage replaying the game. And a extra size after 200 score would be sweet too even if it blocks the screen more, in fact that’s kind of a good thing I would argue, sacrificing gameplay visuals for pushing them to eat more fits the theme beautifully
I also think it would be a good thing to add an extra bonus post-level image/epilogue to reward players that push their scores to extreme 500/1000/2000 score levels. Or an achievement/secret level, just something to work towards for the high scoring players and to have a reason to continue the game that long.
Overall the game is super well polished and I can see a lot of love went into it. Great submission.

[LusMich]

So far this has been my favorite game of the jam (well, at least out of the games that i tried) and i have a lot to say about it:

First of all, i absolutely adore how it looks, I’m not an artist myself so I can’t quite put into words what makes the visuals click for me, but the general color palette and shading style used gives the game a lot of personality on their own, not to mention the astonishingly high production values for a game jam project, i can tell a lot of effort went into this and i strongly respect it

The gameplay loop is quite fun, i almost ended up losing complete track of time while playing it, i know this game takes its inspiration from others like overcooked, and in general this is not a genre i have a lot of experience on, thus I can’t give very detailed feedback on the core mechanics, but i can at least say that as an “outsider” of the genre i still got some fun out of it

I’m actually surprised many folks in here consider the game confusing to get a wrasp on, it didn’t took me more than a glance at the tutorial of each gimmick and a few minutes of play to get what the game’s all about, so at least on my end the game did a good job at teaching me what it was without being too handholdy

I do have a few negatives to point out though:

-While 4 and 5 pips are well designed difficulties imo, 3 pips is just way too easy, It’s borderline free to keep an endless fever streak going and it gets boring really fast. There’s also an annoying bug where the fever bar will still be in display even after being fully depleted if the depletion happens while the customer is eating, which can make it difficult to judge how much patience you have remaining if one is barely holding onto fever chains, which is a common occurrence in five pips.
-While i consider the rest of the levels to be well designed (even the final one on its own sadistic way), the first level is extremely basic, so once you’ve learned what the game is all about, there isn’t much fun you can get out of it anymore compared to the other levels.

I can’t really say these negatives are a big deal, specially since some of them do have a good reason to exist even if i consider them to be flawed, so for the most part i can say this game has succeeded greatly.

Also i didn’t know where else to say this but the fact the customer’s guts could get in the way by blocking your line of view is so funny and I’m really glad it exists (except in the first level for some reason, another reason to dislike that one i suppose lol)

[Hoodah]

Thanks for all the kind words and criticisms, our team is happy to hear the positive reception of the game so far!

@AlexKay

The logic is sound… Perhaps a little too sound as I was playing the first level for close to an hour!

We were worried the concept would be a little hard to grasp for new people from playtesting so we made the Basic level a bit basic, especially on 3 pip settings. If we clean this game up we’ll probably add diminishing time on Fever mode so you have less and less time to chain to keep things snappy. Another way to help save players from themselves is…

@someoneoutthere

Although, funnily enough, there actually is something that adds a bit of ramping difficulty on some levels–namely, the characters’ big bellies. They block your view of part of the map when they get big enough. I don’t know if that’s intentional, but it is kind of amusing.

As a meta way to “push limits”, we put the Guests in the gamescreen to make it harder to play as they got bigger, which would mean eventually the player would be hard pressed to see past their own guest to continue. We didn’t have enough time to implement bigger sizes for all the characters but that was also an intention.

@HectorCollector

ut I am a little confused where the theme “Push the Limits” comes in. If its in the size of the food, I suppose it makes sense, but that only plays into which difficulty I choose. Higher the difficulty, bigger the food needed and thus slower I get when delivering it. But if I never raise the difficulty, I never encounter the limit nor am I tempted to go for those difficulties to encounter it.

Our intent was that you can serve the guests more food by giving them what they want, thus pushing their limits on what they can eat. We tried to design it so if you just fed them random stuff, you wouldn’t be rewarded with larger sizes than if you catered to their tastes. We would like more post-game systems to reward longer playtimes, but we couldn’t show it off in a good way within the span of a jam.

@eman006

I also think it would be a good thing to add an extra bonus post-level image/epilogue to reward players that push their scores to extreme 500/1000/2000 score levels. Or an achievement/secret level, just something to work towards for the high scoring players and to have a reason to continue the game that long.

That’s something we’d like to add if we ever do clean up this concept into a full fledged game, and add more context to the setting at hand. We just didn’t have time to present it in a jam setting.

Again, thanks for all the feedback!