Crampy Kitchen by BisnessPirate
You have been hired to work in the smallest restaurant this side of the atlantic. And you work under quite a penny pincher! You only have two pots, and barely any space for ingredients. And if the restaurant is forced to turn away a customer because it is too full you will get fired on top of that! Make sure to complete every order quickly, before they overwhelm you!
| Source Code | https://github.com/BisnessPirate/CrampyKitchen/tree/main |
| An Itch.io link to the game | https://bisnesspirate.itch.io/crampy-kitchenld54 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/crampy-kitchen |
Ratings
| Overall | 350th | 2.593⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 331th | 2.722⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 344th | 2.481⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 285th | 3.148⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 333th | 2.519⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 282th | 2.278⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 199th | 2.519⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 323th | 2.481⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 34🗨️ |
I had some issues picking up ingredients and I kept being unlucky with my shelves filling up with vegetables I don't need, but worked ok otherwise.
21 is the best I managed to get. Really fun.
Some issues I found:
- At the start of each game, this one piece can't be grabbed at all unless it is pushed over:

- It would be better if the recycling area was way bigger than this so that I don't have to precisely grab and put the stuff inside the bin. Just throwing it out of the shelf to the floor should work and would make it easier to recycle:

- Having some way to know what is already cooking inside the pot would also be helpful since I tend to forget how much and what I already put in.
- After throwing stuff in the pot, they should just disapear instead of being actively colliding inside the pot and making those constant noises.
Good and enjoyable game overall. With a sprinkle of polish here and there this would be some epic stuff. Good job!
I really like the other QOL features you have suggested. And the disappearing off the ingredient when in the pot is a really clever idea I didn't think off. And also how I could easily handle basically making a garbage floor. (That was something I was considering if I were to implement a more throwing type of movement, but I wasn't too sure how to easily do it without the ingredients also disappearing in the pot.)
Very fun game! Has a nice arcade-like quality to it where you immediately get hooked on the gameplay cycle and want to try again and again to improve your score. Very well-designed, great job!

In one such case it got even weirder - I used another vegetable to push the stuck one out, and it got stuck in the vegetable I used to push it out, so I basically had a twin-tomato.
The game felt pretty difficult at first - quite often I found myself lacking the veggies I needed and I lost before new ones arrived. At some point I accidentally figured out the bins aren't just for decoration, and it made it much easier:

I guess that was because the tips screen was visible only once before the game started, and it is a lot of text to take in at once. Having it on a separate screen in-game for reference (i.e. in a pause menu) would be good, but even having it in the main menu would allow the player to re-read them without reloading the entire game.
Overall, it's a pretty good game! It has several simple mechanics which can be quickly understood and it's addictive enough to make you want to try just one more run to do a bit better.
As others noted, the collision bugs are tad annoying, but they also never blocked me from going onwards. Just needs a little picture of the boss getting angrier :)
A tiny annoying thing I had happen is that I had a tomato get stuck in the side of a pot, which caused it to also not respawn, but it didn't matter too much :).