Basically, it's a puzzle/platformer RPG based on a fantasy world version of Iron Chef. Instead of a pantry, you run out and kill monsters for ingredients. And then cook them in a sort of match-3 game.
I love crafting in games, I love cooking as a focus in games, hell, I played a Drow Wizard that created a food truck in one game, even though it had no real incentive (the money was on par with a high Profession roll, so not meaningful).
So I'm looking at making a cooking system. This would be for a game like BCB, where cooking is actually a major part of the game. Hell, it would actually take over large portions of the social minigame since shit would be settled "In the Kitchen" (there's actually a part toward the end where an npc who's just been convicted of treason asks for Trial by Kitchen to lighten his sentence).
At the moment, it's basically a cap system, which could ostensibly be put onto any game. This is just the cooking itself, gear and items and classes and whatnot can wait till after this is settled.
Battle Chef Brigade System Verbatim
- When you kill a monster, you get an ingredient. A lot of monsters drop a random ingredient out of two or three possible, some, like small Hydra heads, always drop a set ingredient. More difficult monsters will typically drop one of each ingredient they can be broken down into.
- Each ingredient is represented in cooking by 1-4 gems, which can be Fire, Earth, Water, Poison, or Bone.
- Poison gems are volatile, and if stirred too much will pop and make adjacent gems fragile. Bone gems are just bulk. You can actually use Poison to debone your stuff, but you have to be careful to set it up that way.
- Gems have ranks, 1-3, worth 1, 5, or 25 points respectively.
- Cooking is done in a 4x4 grid match game, where matching gems gives you 1 gem of the next rank. Basic cookware asks you to match three, but there is cookware that will match 2 gems of a given element, but only match those gems.
- Gems can be "fragile," meaning that moving them will break them (after three or four moves, falling due to stuff disappearing under them doesn't count)
- Matching three poison gems gives you a space that will promote the rank of one gem within, like, 10 secs.
- Matching three bones gives you a wild gem that will match with anything.
- Sauces can convert gem the gems they touch into a specific flavor (like, there's a hot sauce that turns 4 gems in a line into Fire gems, eggs are a sauce that turn two gems in a line into Water gems. There are sauces that convert a square of gems into a given flavor.)
- Your dish has a point value equal to the total value of gems in it (ie, 1 per rank 1 gem, 5 per rank 2 gem, 25 per rank 3 gem)
- Giving a judge a dish that matches their requested flavor gives your dish 50 bonus points.
- Serving a dish with any poison reduces your point value by 20.
- Not including the theme ingredient reduces your dish's point value by half
There are various forms of cookware that do different things. Ovens will change individual gems automatically--repairing fragile gems, promoting gems, cloning gems, etc. Pans alter how things match. There's a pan for each element that will promote gems by matching only two, but only affect a given color of gem, there's a pan that gives you combo bonuses that work like matching poisons, etc. A cutting board allows you to remove gems, including bone and poison.
video
- Gems are represented by dice.
Rank Die Size Flavor Value 1 1d4 1 2 1d8 5 3 1d12 25 - There are seven flavors/forms of die, correlating to energies/elements, and represented by colors
Flavor Energy or Element Die Color Salt Air/Electricity White Bitter Earth/Acid Green Sour Fire Red Umami Sonic Purple Sweet Water/Cold Blue Poison Negative Black Rainbow Positive Opal - Cooking allows you to match three (usually) dice to create one die of the next rank. You cannot have more than 16 dice in you pot at a time.
- Bones are null values, and can be removed by cutting them out. This takes time. You can also merge 3 bones into 1 Rainbow die.
- Poison dice are negative values, and start at rank 3. You can merge Poison dice to demote their rank, and merging three rank 1 poison dice allows you to promote one die of any type.
- Some dice are fragile (denoted by just putting them aside). There is a cumulative 20% chance of 1d4 fragile dice breaking whenever you merge dice. If you have poison dice in your pool, 1 will automatically break whenever a die breaks, causing one die to become fragile.
- Fragile dice lose the fragile condition when they are merged.
Your dish has a flavor value based on the number and rank of flavor dice. When a judge requests a flavor, add up the points for the dice of that flavor (1 for each rank 1, 5 for each rank 2, 25 for each rank 3). The dish with the higher flavor value gains 25 points. If a judge requests multiple flavors, the values of those flavors must be with 5 points of each other to be eligible.
The dish with the higher point value wins the competition.
Cooking needs to be done in rounds, I think, but not necessarily in combat time. It could just be "you have 60 minutes" and each match takes some number of minutes, and cutting bones or poison out of an ingredient takes some number of minutes, and plating takes some number of minutes. This could interact with character abilities, where someone is really fast at plating, so they halve the time cost for it, and someone is really fast at prep, so they halve the time cost of cutting out bones and poison, and so on.
Again, this is for a game where cooking is a major thing, and every character is expected to cook.