I got an absolutely great letter this year. It was clear and concise, yet had tons of information for me to jump off of. I literally saw that dog and loved him immediately, that dog being Louie, named after the Pikman games. I also was drawn to the cooking aspect of his hobbies The story of wanting to cook because the restaurants he liked closed down is so relatable because you just want that comfort food so bad again, but cannot get it. The idea of combining both D O G and cooking did not actually come up until later where I had to replace my placeholder character, (coincidentally from Mechanoid Masters) and said, "Hey, this is a great idea!"
I wanted the gameplay-loop to almost mimic burgertime because they said they like time management challenges in their games. I toned this back, though in favor of a more chill, short and sweet game. The solving puzzles aspect did stay and became a great way to have a player decode a recipe into the inputs they needed in order to pass the dish.
Development was absolute hell. For most of it, my and system didn't even work, so you could not even progress. In other ones, physics broke, sending bricks into the air. I spent a good 6 hours finally figuring out how to "score" the food. I landed on a global variable that needed to equal a certain number, which actually worked very well in the end, even though I needed to add the reset trashcan. My favorite catastrophic thing that happened though has to be a phenomenon that I call "microwave skip". This skip was super op, you just had to spam onto the microwave, like a weird knockoff blj, and *boom*, you passed the stage. SO many music problems, variable function mishaps, timing concerns, ect were present that needed to be fixed. God bless microwave skip, you will be missed.
In an act of pure stupidity, I once considered and even started putting in a running-dodging-platforming section. I have 0 idea why I thought that would be a good idea but obviously, I thankfully did not make that be part of the cut.
This jam was so fun and as I said on the discord, I cannot decide if I love or hate the gameplay, but it has so much charm that I am happy with it. It was mostly done in one 16 hour stretch because of schoolwork but you know, what can you do?