The Recipe Book (ignore DropBox’s big red “Enable JavaScript” message, and use the download link top right) is something I’ve had in the back of my head for a while now as an idea for a game: the player learns to cook from a highly suspect book in order to save their relationship. It’s unfinished but has some of the important ideas worked out.
I started tinkering with it in TADS3 originally, but decided it would better in Twine as it doesn’t benefit from having a map to explore. I got frustrated with working in Twine 2 though. But, looking at the source for the Free Cities pregmod, I found out about building Twine stories with Tweego, and it makes things so much easier to a long-time coder like myself - passages and code can be organised in a hierarchy of folders and edited with a regular text editor for starters.
I’ve left all the debugging in and active, the in-game bits, the Sugarcube stuff that appears bottom right, and the web console log messages (I use Firefox mainly, and Tools->Web Developer->Web Console will let you see those) so you can see how it works. Some passages are unfinished, but they shouldn’t be game breaking.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this. My main focus is still Yaffaif, but I really just needed to get this idea out of my head, and something to work on when I needed a break. One thought was to put it up on a repo somewhere if anyone’s interested in adding to it.
It’s a pretty good proof-of-concept. It’s not particularly mind-blowing, of course, but it works.
Definitely could get old, though. I don’t know if you’ve got this planned or if it would even be worthwhile, but if it was possible, it might be nice for the game to allow more organic “discovery” of recipes. Getting inspired by watching a cooking show on the TV seems natural enough, but it would be interesting of, during cooking, the player might be presented with the opportunity to go “off-script.” Like, at one point during making a Scrambled Eggs on Toast, your character might muse at making a proper sandwich, and you’d be prompted to select either an additional ingredient or change in method out of a variety of presented changes. Choose a good one, and you’ll have discovered a new recipe; a bad one simply screws up the current recipe. Could be interesting.
I love it! I think If you added more descriptions for bigger sizes, maybe one every 50 or 100 pounds gained, it would add more to the weight gain aspect, as well as more descriptions of bust size as there seems to be little of that in the descriptions. Other than that I cannot wait for this game to be complete!
I totally agree - in order to keep it interesting there needs to be a continuous stream of little challenges to meet. Like making a meal for your neighbours, a birthday party, your partner’s boss (big opportunity to improve things or mess them up).
The way the thing is built a new recipe can be opened up by pretty much anything. So something like learning a recipe from the TV can be done, which I do like as it changes a waste of time task into something that could potentially improve things.
Going off-script in the middle of preparing a recipe might be challenging to code, but I do like that idea.
The idea in the back of my head would that you would eventually end up having to make a choice to specialise in certain types of cooking. One would be whether to focus on healthy things or fattening ones. To focus on your partners needs or to build a business etc.
The game tracks mass in kilos, and at the start they change every 5kg (11 lbs). As you get bigger the changes come less frequently - mainly, it has to be said, because I was running out of inspiration at that point. It would be good to have more description there.
The boobs got seperated out as I had the idea of getting to the point of having special recipes that affected specific body parts.
Played this game a while back and thought it was really cool! It’s at the top of latest rn and seeing the thread again I thought the game deserved more praise. It’s awesome and the mechanic for gaining is really creative
Other than the fact that it’s unfinished (which is forgivable. Every game is until it isn’t), this is absolutely masterful. All it needs now to to be expanded upon.
The Recipe Book is kind of my backup project to Yaffaif, for when I feel like taking a break from it. Unfortunately for this project, Yaffaif is developing well, and I haven’t needed to put it aside for a while.
That’s my bad. I more just wanted to clarify whether there had been change because you’d said before this game was kind of on the backburner for your main project, and after a few months I was worried if I commented it would be a bit of a necropost.
I could be wrong, but it’s been my understanding that the rule about asking for updates is more regarding demanding a new update to a game or badgering the dev about the next release. I’ve seen a fair number of comments along the lines of “is this game dead?” or “is this game still being worked on?” which not only allows for the ability to claim a project is dead with proof (see the second half of that rule) but also importantly better encapsulates my previous comment, which I believe did not say something like “next update when” and rather asked the direct question of whether this game had been updated. So ultimately, I feel as though it wasn’t really against that rule, it was not a targeted question of when you will be updating the game, but a concerned inquiry of whether the game has been/will be.
We don’t have a problem with necroposting, unlike other forums. Projects run for a long time and it’s inevitable that some questions are going to be asked after a long time.
To be fair, yours wasn’t the only post that got flagged on this topic, and it was “gone” before I woke - I wasn’t involved in the moderation decisions. My reply was vaguely worded to address both the posts, knowing that the majority of users wouldn’t be able to see what was already hidden. If I’d have caught it I would have probably just answered it (it was a factual question about what had happened), as it’s my OP, and I know the answer.
