CULINARY DOMINATION

GAME INFO

CONTRIBUTIONS

DESIGN GOALS

Create a very personal and customizable 4X experience where players can make their very own culinary empire.

Create a randomly generated map that balances itself out with different customers with different needs.

PLAYER CUSTOMIZATION

From the get go we wanted players to have a variety of different ways to customize their empire to we laid out 3 core skill trees that would lead to three different generic ways of creating a restaurant. (American franchise, mom and pop restaurant, or fine dining). Each providing different bonuses and encouraging different styles of play.
We also played around with the idea of players being able to make their own recipes. Being able to create a hamburger but altering the different ingredients which would affect the cost of the food but increase the profit while providing other bonuses.

CUSTOMERS & MAP GENERATION

Customers took the most amount of time to design because we had to figure out how to determine what food customers would prefer, how much money they would spend, and how to generate these values. We ended up splitting the map up into different districts. Each district would have a different randomized value to determine the spending money of the average customer, how many customers per district, and the preferred taste of the customers in the district. This would create a scenario where players would target different districts and hopefully fight over control of the territory.
Each district would only have so many plots for building restaurants and players were able to outbid each other for control of a contested restaurant plot.

UI/UX

This was by far the task I had underestimated the most. Being a 4X game there is tons of information that needs to be consolidated to be as legible and understandable as possible. This would require a lot of research to see how other 4X games use UI to try and breakdown and layer information to the player to help provide them with everything they need but not overwhelm them.
This would require constant iteration, feedback, and back and forth with the programmers to determine what we could and couldn't do given our time-frame.

CONCLUSION

This would actually be both my first group project and designer project while working alongside others. Overall I learned a lot when it comes to working with multiple departments, documentation, and overall communication. While a 4X game might have been a little too complex given that we only had a semester to work on it. I found the overall experience and lessons learned invaluable.

Michael Benavides