Launch Time Diner

Development Time: September-November 2021

Team Size: 8

Technology: Unity

Platform: PC

Role: Narrative and Systems Designer

Game Trailer

Game Playthrough

Intent

Launch Time Diner delivers a relaxing and comical, yet thought provoking VR experience. Piloting a food truck that travels through spaces, the player must combine various foods and machines to satisfy alien customers. As the player uses all of the tools at their disposal to fulfill the needs of each customer, their approval rating will increase, unlocking new planets.

Challenges

Launch Time Diner presented me with several challenges as a narrative designer. The world of Launch Time Diner had to be wacky. The aliens had to be weird and the foods had to be even weirder. However, text was limited, there was no dialogue, and there was no room for character bios. To achieve the intended feel for the game’s narrative, I worked with the other designer and the artists to create all of the foods and aliens. Through this collaboration, I was able to create aliens and foods that told a story on their own, like a humanoid whale that likes eating tentacles with tardigrades on top of them between two moon rocks.

  • The Growalizer
  • Each machine impacts flavors in different ways

The second major challenge we encountered was that the gameplay didn’t have much actual depth. We wanted the gameplay to be thought provoking, but players were really just throwing food around and serving aliens what they asked for. Many players didn’t see that as a problem, as that was very fun, but it wasn’t our intended experience. To solve this problem, we came up with a system of 4 flavors: Alpha, Omega, Sigma, and Theta. Each alien would have a flavor they do want and a flavor they don’t want. Each food would have some of these flavors and each machine would give and take away some of these flavors. Just like in real life, satisfying customers was now a complex puzzle to solve.

  • The Clowno Sapien
  • The Clowno Sapien’s preferences
  • A satisfied customer
  • The Jellysquish
  • Whaley
  • The Tardigrade Shaker
  • The Moon Rock
  • The Tentacle

Postmortem

Though the game needed a bit more polishing and just a little more depth in the gameplay loop, we did deliver our intended experience. The charm of the aliens, foods, and machines captured the hearts of many of our peers and was certainly an important learning experience for working in VR.