eatingYOURbrain

Frenchy – A young French Roast bean  who hates his family for making him move and controlling his life.  He’s practically a grown up, fully roasted bean and they treat him like a child.  He’s ready for excitement!  Adventure!  And that’s exactly what he gets when the coffee bean bag he’s traveling inside with his family rips and he falls out in the middle of nowhere.  Now he’ll have more adventure than he knows what to do with finding his way to the big Java city where he hopes his family is waiting for him.

Decaf Pop Pop – This is Frenchy’s grandfather, the only one who really understands him.  He’s a big fan of terrible jokes, and he’s always giving Frenchy cryptic advice that Frenchy doesn’t understand until much later.  Frenchy has flashbacks throughout the game where he figures out his grandfather’s advice and it helps him get through his adventures.

Ethiopian Brew -  A hippie and a drifter that Frenchy meets in the coarse of his adventures. E.B. is super mellow, which is pretty unusual for a coffee bean.  She believes that all things are like harmonious, man, and she always sees the best in people which means that she falls into traps and drags Frenchy with her.

Mocha Latte – She’s a total party girl who wants Frenchy to stay with her in her small, one grinder town because she thinks he’s a blast.  Really, she’s super lonely and tired of everyone leaving her behind for bigger and buzzier destinations.  (She’s like the sirens in the Odyssey, trying to get Frenchy to give up on his journey for her.)

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I often say that time is just an illusion and since 2010 started, I found this statement quite surreal: days have been vanishing away.  It sounds scary because everyone loves to remind me I just turned 25 and time will keep going faster and tomorrow I’ll be old and rambling and I’ll be old and.. well, I’ll drink more coffee.

What truly matters is the discovery of a cheat for the said illusion, instead of learning AS 3.0 from lovely books and the all-knowingly-o-mighty-Internet, I stumbled onto flixel, and its promising tutorials of flourishing code and scripts I won’t have to type.  (Just because I am too stubborn to prototype in AS 2.0 and Coffee Break is a self-discipline technique to learn the–not so–new language of Flash.

Now that you, my faithful reader, are very impressed and curious, I am just going to use good old English and descriptively write down my game design prototype for Coffee Break.

The player interacts in game with the mouse, most likely represented by a hand, or a coffee pot.

She can left-click, drag and release.

The basic objective is to lead our main character, Frenchy the coffee bean from point A to B.  In this written example, he’ll start to the very left of the level and discover the basic game mechanics while traveling to the right end.

Frenchy is pretty grumpy and/or sleepy.  If you drag the coffee pot near him, he’ll just grab it, stealing the player’s cursor (and control in-game) and drink all the coffee before going nuts in some kind of way.  (I picture him running into a wall away from the player (Z depth — it’s almost game over but funny, at least the first time you see it.)

Coffee mugs are strategically placed throughout the level and the player must lure Frenchy by pouring coffee into them.

Depending on the kind of coffee, the size of the mugs and other variable to be determined, a delicious aroma teases Frenchy who zombily-walks to them and ravenously empties them.

Over time, the once perfectly warm coffee cools down and its sweet scent vanishes.  Frenchy stops.

I want to experiment with the player’s cursor as a hand, so the player gets to actually make the coffee, maybe as a mini-game, or a sort of puzzle based challenge.  If that turns out to be boring or disconnecting the experience from the characters, the cursor-coffee-pot still needs a source of coffee, its own the fountain of life.

Therefore, the coffee pot has a meter, quantifying the amount of coffee, its freshness and all that jazz.

The pouring mechanic is simply using Pythagoras’s formula.

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I came across this today, it’s the latest art from Jublin, an artist I really like.
He’s well-known on website like threadless & design by humans.
He’s awesome with facial expression, so I though this could be a nice inspiration for our little characters

You can check his complete portfolio here.
I invite you to check his Pokemon’s serie, it’s hilarious!

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Here’s a great source of inspiration! This game is so creative and so fun! They have a demo version for free on the iPhone, and the full game is only $0,99.

I love the art. The bear and the penguin only have 4 or 5 states, and the animation cycles are quite simple too. The game also has nice backgrounds. If you look at the ratio of the character vs background, that’s how big I see our little coffee bean characters.

I like the idea of repeating the same character, to create a “gang” of them. When you play, you’ll see that they make funny expressions when they hit the polar bear or the ice wall.

I also like the idea of dividing the level with a map (remember Super Mario Bros 3?).
So you can see the progression you did. And some special level could appear, like bonus level! An extra-cafeine or a double expresso to go! I dunno

So here’s one direction we could take instead of a direct story telling game like the Robot game (sorry I forgot the name…) [Edit: I will eventually write a game design research post and include that game. - Mélanie]. But I don’t know how hard would be to code this kind of game, maybe we could figure out something that doesn’t need some gravity calculation?

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