What makes a good Cooking With a Gun level?

With the beta presentation done and less than two weeks left of the course, I feel like now is a good time to reflect on what we did well as a team and did poorly. This was my first time leading a team of this size and I am incredibly grateful to have been given such an amazing group of people and I am really quite proud of what we were able to do in such a short amount of time. With that said, I proceed with the question of this blog post: What makes a good Cooking With a Gun (CWAG) level? 

From our 70+ formal playtests in both alpha and beta, our designers have found among a slew of other things:

•  "The game holds your hand too much"
  • A non negligible amount of players are generally confused when objects magically move into place, like how the egg floats to the pan on the Fried Egg level.
  • Players like to take as much control as they can with the world using the gun
  • Players don't seem to like auto-reload
• The soup level felt a little confusing
  • The mixing step did not feel like mixing, there was no reason to be shooting the bowl
• Players like shooting
• Players like chaos

With these findings in mind and after some thought and reflection, I have come up with 3 things that I feel like are the core things that make up a Cooking With a Gun level:

• The player should feel like they are cooking something, rather than following a series of disconnected steps
  • The game at its core, is a cooking game, the player should feel like by the end of following the cooking steps, that they have created a dish out of what once were raw ingredients. If it does not feel this way, no matter how interesting the steps are, the player will always feel like something was missing from what they were promised.
• The gun should be your main tool.
  •  As many interactions as possible that can use the gun, should use the gun.
  • We should minimize the amount of hand-holding the game does with things flying around for you.
  • A player comes to this game with the expectation that they are using the gun to cook. This is the second core player promise.
• The levels should be chaotic and make use of physics
  • There is an unwritten expectation that cooking with a gun will result in a very messy, chaotic road to success. The very idea that someone is cooking with a gun is absurd and silly. We as designers should leverage this expectation to create a lot of silly and fun chaotic physics interactions.

The results kind of seem obvious that they would be true, but during the creation of the levels and throughout every design meeting, it's really easy to overlook these and lose sight of why in Cooking With a Gun you are cooking with a gun. I believe this is true for every game, as when you are in the thick of it, we forget what about these ideas drew us to them to begin with as we are more worried about technical details and problems to solve. We as developers should stay diligent and should constantly remind ourselves of these pillars and player promises as to not stray too far from the main path, as it is so easy to do.  To me, these things are the heart of what makes a good CWAG level.

Moving forward with the game, with preparations before Level Up 2025, and even hopes of a steam release one day in the future, I feel like these findings will be very useful for us and any future plans we have for the game!