Ace Baker: Cake-baking Simulator 20XX
Jamming to increase asexual representation in games.
As 2017 drew to a close, my personal projects got put on a bit of a hold. With a Thanksgiving trip back to the US and client projects crunching up before Christmas, I decided to give myself a little break from my ‘homework’.
Of course, ending a break is always harder than deciding to take one. Thankfully, itch.io had my back. In the deluge of e-mails I’ve been getting since submitting Honour, one stood out: an invitation to Ace Jam.
Ace: an abbreviation of asexual; a person who has no sexual feelings or desires.
“[This] is a game jam about creating games with asexual spectrum characters. Given that there are relatively few games out there with asexual characters, let alone asexual characters in primary roles, I thought I’d host a game jam to go about changing that.” Metaparadox
It’s not something I regularly advertise, but I am asexual, so this jam immediately piqued my interest. As I leaned back and thought about the prompt above, I began to realize that no, I really haven’t encountered very many asexual game characters (perhaps even none explicitly mentioned as such in a neutral/positive light). Mass Effect’s Mordin Solus did come to mind, but even there, asexuality is essentially used as a way to emphasize the alien nature of his species.
Brainstorming
One of the biggest hurdles in my game-making process is always the concept phase. I’ll either spin my wheels trying to think up an interesting, engaging story, or otherwise lose sight of the plot while considering whether gameplay will actually be fun. In this case, the stars aligned and soon after sitting down to brainstorm, I came up with the following idea:
Your partner is coming home from work early — and you were supposed to make a cake for [some special event]! But, you live in a sci-fi future and all the ingredients in your kitchen are in some alien language! Better figure out what’s tasty and what’s trash in order to make a cake for your beloved…
Many of the submissions to Ace Jam have been quite serious takes on asexuality: intimate experiences of hardship, discrimination, and coming out. I… chose not to take that route. I’ve never really experienced anything along those lines and didn’t want to stray from what I know when dealing with such a personal topic. So instead, I reflected upon my own relationship with my wife and how my being asexual impacts that. In the game, your partner is explicitly asexual, while your orientation is left ambiguous. Beyond a line of dialogue and some art, the game’s not really about asexuality.
The cake-baking aspect, on the other hand, was influenced by a few different things. First off, preferring cake to sex is a common meme in the community that, to me, seemed ripe for creative interpretation. Lately, I’d also been enjoying Breath of the Wild’s fantastic cooking mechanic. There, you can cook almost anything in your inventory (rocks and monster guts included), but if you want to make some real special meals, you need to keep an eye out for in-world recipes and rare ingredients. Lastly, I thought back to a little game called Something Something Soup Something, in which you work in QA, determining whether alien-made soups are fit to serve in a restaurant. I absolutely loved the ridiculousness of being confronted with anything from “a foamy liquid with shrimp and meat slices, served in a coconut with an ice cream scoop,” to “rocks with a fish tail and batteries, served in a hat with a straw,” and having to determine its soupy-ness.
The story in my game was a bit rough around the edges until the end, but I knew that as long as I could get an engaging intro and gameplay that actually makes you think a little, I could definitely come out of this jam having created an enjoyable experience.
Aesthetics
While the language barrier-as-gameplay could also have worked in any old country here on Earth, I always love pushing away from the everyday and setting my stories elsewhere in time and space. In Ace Baker, we’re in a retrofuturistic universe where people mine literal bitcoins, are addicted to VR dramas, yet somehow still use text-based UIs for all their computers?
In keeping with that last detail, imagery is minimal and all input is handled through the keyboard (sorry mobile players). I took inspiration from UI elements in the original Alien movie, but in all honesty, I spent much more time coding the actual functionality than getting pixel perfect screens. This was just a month-long jam (that I started 2 weeks in), after all.
Artwork
Partially by choice and partially by constraints, all the game artwork is low-bit pixel art. I of course love working in this style, however at the time, I didn’t have access to Photoshop or Illustrator. This forced me to look into some online tools, which led me to my new best friend for making pixel art: Piskel. Piskel is a super-simple in-browser sprite creation tool, though it works just as well for single-frame art. It’s free, has most of the tools I would’ve used in Photoshop anyway, and live-previews at the size you need. 9/10, would recommend!
Game Design
To better understand the design, go give Ace Baker a quick spin. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, I promise.
Back? Alright, now let’s look beyond the code to the core mechanic: baking cakes. How’s it done? Just follow the simple recipe below!
- Access a master list of ingredients with their alien names, pictures, amounts, values, and result texts, but just display the names & pictures
- Select 3 ingredients from the list and confirm
- Determine whether the resulting cake is disgusting, acceptable, or perfect by categorizing the sum of the values for each ingredient
- Describe the contents of the resulting cake using the result texts so the player can begin to guess at which selected ingredient causes which aspect of the result
- Log the amount of each type of cake created
- Et voilà, the game is finished!
Of course it’s not actually that simple, but the features below and others all deal with individual functionalities, edge cases, and moving along the flow of the game.
- the mechanics of ingredient selection, including preventing duplicate selection and handling an end state where the player has run out of ingredients
- figuring out which values to give each ingredient so the sum will determine the result cake (eg. 2 perfect ingredients and an acceptable one will produce a perfect cake, but almost anything using a disgusting one will make a disgusing cake)
- building the result sentence using a mix of nouns and adjectives associated with each ingredient so as to reduce predictability
Language
I am a web designer by trade, not a game designer. Therefore, when I want to make a game, I usually fall back to what I know best: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This time was no different; to reduce complexities and dependencies, I simply stuck with Vanilla JS for everything except for the automatic typing, for which I used TypeIt. Check the rest of the credits at my GitHub.
Promotion
I suppose, when you make a game, you’re should promote it, right? Most of the time when I do these projects, they’re totally self-serving learning experiences. Documentation is more for my own record than for any kind of self-promotion. In this case, however, the nature of the topic made it a bit more important to share my creation. The creator of the jam also invited a few streamers to play the submissions and, to my surprise, the two streamers below picked up my game!
This was the first time I had ever watched someone play one of my games from a blank slate (though I had done some playtesting with a previous card-based game) and it felt really good. While I can see some obvious areas for improvement, namely, adjusting ingredient amounts to put the stakes for failure a bit higher and making it a bit easier to associate ingredients with results, they don’t bother me that much. It was just nice to see that a couple of people got a good 10 minutes of enjoyment out of this little experiment of mine.
Post Mortem
All in all, I’m quite satisfied with my submission to 2018’s Ace Jam. Any shortcomings I can think of can be attributed more to a limited time frame than my limited abilities. Of course, since I’m a self-critical perfectionist, I will list out those shortcomings regardless.
Ingredient database
The database holding all the ingredients is just a 2-level array as such: ingredientList[ingredientIndex][indexValue]. I’m certain I could’ve structured this in a better way, perhaps defining each ingredient as an object, instead of as an array value. Additionally, images are assigned to each ingredient based on their numerical file name as they are being populated onto the page through a for loop. Definitely the worst way to do that.
Music
I’m getting better. The introductory conversation has notification beeps and there’s at least some background music during gameplay so you’re not staring at your screen in silence. However, volume levels are not equalized and there could probably be a better introduction to the music. Not to mention the lack of any music at the end. The cake result screen would definitely have benefited from a different bit of chiptune for each cake type.
Scoring/Stakes
The stakes are pretty low here. Starting off, I find it much better to err on the the side of ‘too easy’ and, despite a complete lack of testing, 80% Relatable was able to get a perfect cake in around 5 minutes. Not bad. But it could be better. Throughout the development process, I kept waffling back and forth on whether the game needed a timer, and in the end I decided it didn’t. The limited ingredients and guessing-game nature of the alien names provided enough difficulty, I found, but something was still missing — personal competition. Gamers have always strove to get the highest score or the fastest time, but here, no one’s counting. Well, not exactly. The game does keep track of the amounts of different types of cakes made, but it’s easy to miss and doesn’t really provide any incentives beyond noting the amount of 💩s you’ve made. Maybe this would be an area on which to expand?
And if you haven’t already…
PLAY THE GAME!
or, check out the rest of the cool submissions to the jam!
These articles document monthly projects I am doing to expand my knowledge across the wide range of disciplines that can be loosely associated with ‘design’. Previous works here: aja5174.cias.rit.edu & amicidesigns.tumblr.com
