Bistro Cafard by VividReality
Bistro Cafard is a restaurant simulator inspired by Papers Please and Cooking Mama, where you play chef Cafard. He aims to get 3 Michelin stars for his bistro. You have to cook meals with a special kind of ingredient. Without spoiling too much fun, we'll just say that underneath the surface, some things are not quite what it seems.
Run source in Love Framework, which works in Windows, Linux, and OS/X. Get it from https://love2d.org/.
If you want to take a look inside the source and or content, rename the extension ".love" to ".zip" and open it in your favorite archive manager.
Genre: Strategy / Simulation
===FAQ===
Q: Controls?
A: The game is played with the mouse, the only button you need is the left button. Also, you might want to start with clicking on the book in the bottom left. Don't worry, the game is paused when you have the book open.
Q: I placed all ingredients on the middle of the cutting board but nothing happens!
A: Are you sure that you either fried or boiled the ingredients where necessary? Notice the difference between "eggs" and "boiled eggs" for instance! The former needs to be used raw, the latter needs to be boiled first! Also, the hitbox of the cutting board is too small, we had a smaller cutting board in an earlier stage of the game, but we never edited the hitbox, please take this into account and check if the ingredients are really in the middle of the cutting board.
Q: How do I serve food?
A: Drag and drop the dish to the table where it is needed.
Q: Why aren't there more recipes/ingredients?
A: We had more content in mind, but we struggled with the deadline. If you like the concept, but want more content, follow the gamejolt profile as we will add more content in the post-compo version!
Q: Why is the garden scene so boring / Does it do anything at all?
A: We had a a more challenging scene in mind, but we had too many features to complete everything before the deadline, and we had to make priorities on what to make fun. The animals you shoot however, are added to your inventory in the refridgerator.
Q: What happens when the refridgerator says 0 for an item? I can still get it!
A: Maybe you notice that you have to pay for items that aren't in your refridgerator, and you don't have to pay for items that are in your inventory. So when an item has a value higher than 0, it's free.
Every question asked and covered in the FAQ will also be covered in the post-compo version in a tutorial or more descriptive introduction in the handbook. We're still thinking about the best approach for this.
Run source in Love Framework, which works in Windows, Linux, and OS/X. Get it from https://love2d.org/.
If you want to take a look inside the source and or content, rename the extension ".love" to ".zip" and open it in your favorite archive manager.
Genre: Strategy / Simulation
===FAQ===
Q: Controls?
A: The game is played with the mouse, the only button you need is the left button. Also, you might want to start with clicking on the book in the bottom left. Don't worry, the game is paused when you have the book open.
Q: I placed all ingredients on the middle of the cutting board but nothing happens!
A: Are you sure that you either fried or boiled the ingredients where necessary? Notice the difference between "eggs" and "boiled eggs" for instance! The former needs to be used raw, the latter needs to be boiled first! Also, the hitbox of the cutting board is too small, we had a smaller cutting board in an earlier stage of the game, but we never edited the hitbox, please take this into account and check if the ingredients are really in the middle of the cutting board.
Q: How do I serve food?
A: Drag and drop the dish to the table where it is needed.
Q: Why aren't there more recipes/ingredients?
A: We had more content in mind, but we struggled with the deadline. If you like the concept, but want more content, follow the gamejolt profile as we will add more content in the post-compo version!
Q: Why is the garden scene so boring / Does it do anything at all?
A: We had a a more challenging scene in mind, but we had too many features to complete everything before the deadline, and we had to make priorities on what to make fun. The animals you shoot however, are added to your inventory in the refridgerator.
Q: What happens when the refridgerator says 0 for an item? I can still get it!
A: Maybe you notice that you have to pay for items that aren't in your refridgerator, and you don't have to pay for items that are in your inventory. So when an item has a value higher than 0, it's free.
Every question asked and covered in the FAQ will also be covered in the post-compo version in a tutorial or more descriptive introduction in the handbook. We're still thinking about the best approach for this.
Ratings
| Coolness | 92% | 2 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.54 | 161 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.67 | 122 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.49 | 118 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.80 | 209 |
| Humor(Jam) | 3.72 | 56 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.31 | 235 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.45 | 203 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.36 | 271 |
Enjoy :)
Sometimes it was hard to place items on the board and get it to work, but otherwise solid!
I found I could also pre-prepare dishes. Perhaps have a limit to how many items you can have on the table?
Also, it might be nice to introduce new menu items every round!
FANTASTIC!
Nonetheless we felt like it was playable, and not to forget fun! We will work on the post-ludum version and add everything we wanted in this version :)
This is fun, with a nice twist in your night missions! Because of the font you used, I didn't actually notice the numbers showing my available stockpile going down in the fridge until the fourth day or so, so at first I was left wondering: "Why am I shooting these animals? I understand it from a narrative perspective, but not from a gameplay one."
Honestly, this is a brilliant execution of the theme, and a pretty good cooking game to boot. However, there's some stuff I think you could tune to make it a bit better:
1. Why not just have the ingredients gathered on the chopping block become a prepared meal, rather than needing to stack the items together? If there's a worry about incorrectly mixing the meal, well,
2. Most restaurant games have a convention where you can give plates to the wrong customer and waste your work--that might be an appropriate thing to consider.
3. I played for four days or so, with 100% approval rating after the first game, but the difficulty curve never really got tough, and there wasn't a need to cook the beef stroganoff at any point. My expectation was that I'd need to start preparing dishes and ingredients ahead of time in order to be able to serve customer needs, thus possibly making me waste ingredients in an attempt to plan--but the difficulty curve didn't do the thing, and I ended up getting bored in the end since it really wasn't getting any harder.
4. I expected that when my "meat" stores ran out I'd be unable to prepare a dish--instead I just bought cockroaches, apparently. Since I wasn't in any danger of running out of money at any point, this kind of undermined the hunting portion of the game.
Make a full version? I'd love the opportunity to steal vegetables from my neighbors' gardens. Choosing between that and hunting could keep the pacing fresh.
One issue I did have with the game was that it did seem to not take my stock into account? I used items despite having 0 in stock, and there didn't seem to be any cost or punishment to it, at least not one I could see.
The instructions were also a little unclear; it took me a while to figure out how to cook things and assemble them. The pacing might have been able to be tweaked a little better as well. Since the game doesn't increase in content, challenge, and difficulty, the game should probably be pretty short.
That said, I loved the graphics in the game. The gameplay itself is very smooth and fun. Also, I have to say that I doubly loved your game when I saw that men sat with men, while women sat with women. I don't know if the situation is necessarily a dating one, but it caught my attention and I appreciated it nonetheless :]! Awesome game!