Welcome to my little Game jam post-mortem writeup! I have a lot to say but i tend to yap a lot so I'll try keeping it on the shorter side as well.

It’s been a wild ride experience all of this, from concept till the end. It’s been a fun journey and learning experience working on Dine-in Dungeon (DiD) for the RPG maker game jam and I wanted to share some insights and behind the scenes working on DiD. As well as my final thoughts as I move on to new projects on the horizon!

To start off. I found out about the RPG maker jam around two weeks before the it’s start. I’m no stranger to game dev and game jams, but it had been 3 years since I last did anything game dev related. I figured this would be my gateway back into making games as I’ve been itching to work on another long-term project again. I guess I was just the right place at the right time sort of thing~

The concept of the game was pretty much set in stone that I wanted to make a cooking game for this jam. I’m a big fan of Delicious in Dungeon and you can tell a lot of inspiration was taken from that show! As well as an indie game called Battle chef brigade! I love food and cooking! (which is ironic cause I can barely cook IRL) and the concept of hunting your ingredients simultaneously is such a novel concept I wish more games did.

Majority of the game's development looked like this, default RTP and placeholder assets from my previous game

Speaking of concepts. Incorporating the jam theme was a bit tricky on my end. I approach game jams with a “make the game first, incorporate the theme later” philosophy. It tends to work out well but It tends to make my jam entries on the weaker end when it comes to incorporating theme. Gameplay wise I tried to incentivize the players to go beyond the required quota by offering rewards if you did (cola’s shop). Narratively I decided upon a “David/Goliath” style story.

I feel like I could have done a better job with both of them, but majority of the jam time for me was struggling to make the game work! The first 15 days of the jam was all about making sure the game mechanics worked from all the cooking busywork, serving customers, and gathering dungeon resources. I scrapped a whole lot of ideas that weren’t working out from the game having turn based combat to having a stamina system to make your management even more stressful. There was also a point where I wanted the final day to be a boss fight in the dungeon while managing orders. But scrapped because of time.

don't have any footage from when it was still turn based. but this build had a lot of scrapped ideas on it    

The mechanic that gave me the BIGGEST struggle though was the timer system. Making a game with a timer system meant you had to be EXTRA vigilant on how to resolve whatever your player was doing last. Like, if they were mid animation, or they left some food in the oven. I’d hand it off to a friend to playtest and they would always find some new bug that had to do with the time system and I wanted to pull my hair out whenever I would see it.

The entire game takes place in one map! this had a lot of perks but also a lot of cons!    

Once the foundation was finally set up. I finally had time to start working on everything else. At this rate I only had 15 days left so I knew I shouldn’t be too ambitious with the content. Five days was perfect for a good ramp up between the game mechanics and story beats. But making sure the game flowed cohesively took a bit of work, some things I made sure when working things out at this stage were making sure cutscenes were no longer than 15 dialogue boxes, and each day added a new challenge that complemented the previous day.

Concept sketches for Matcha Kettlebrew, i tried to find a balance between a Dungeon diver and someone who would work at a tavern

For the characters and setting, I only had the main character and the setting planned from the start. The titular dungeon setting and Matcha the halfling. There’s a lot of influence from dungeon meshi within the characters (Matcha having some similarities to Thistle, Breve’s clothes, sangria and senshi). Fun fact, every named character is based off a beverage!

One other thing I will say regarding the setting was the music played a big part in how I designed them all. Originally, I had a Chinese setting in mind because I wanted to use foodstuffs like dumplings. But decided to pivot to a more traditional Celtic fantasy finding the music pack I used for the game.

And yeah! That’s pretty much all highlights on the gamedev side. DiD is probably my most ambitious project so far and I’m definitely surprised and happy at how well it was received! To be honest I have really low self-esteem so I just want to give another heartfelt thank you to everyone involved in making this possible. From my friends who playtested and lent their voices to this project, to everyone who spent some time to play my game!

One more thing, I did make a small bet with myself that, if I won this jam, I would commit to making Dine-in Dungeon into an actual full project. So maybe you’ll see more of Matcha in the future eh~

Till next time!