It is submitted, with ten hours to spare!
Is there a version of “itadakimasu” for “let’s eat in ten hours”?
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十時後にいただきます, I guess?
お楽しみにします (I am looking forward to it)!
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Thank you @rovarsson for the food-in-IF post. Your knowledge of IF in general and cooking scenes within IF continues to amaze.
During the battle, you’ve also piqued my curiosity with whiffs of games I’d not heard of (e.g. Inevitable (Kathleen M. Fischer) though I know that wasn’t one of the food ones.)
I tried to match cooking scenes with you and mostly failed. The first one I thought of was from a recent @aschultz game, but then I couldn’t remember how many of the ingredients were actually food, and naming the game outright might constitute a minor spoiler in its case, so I can’t even score a point for it!
I recall Snowhaven by Tristin Grizel Dean which is centred around making a stew. What’s interesting is that it has three play modes, and I can quote @DeusIrae 's review here:
The central business of this evocative Adventuron game is cooking, and appropriately enough, on starting up you’re given a choice of seasonings: the story can be served up pleasant, “emotive” (said emotion being melancholy), or sinister.
So there you’ve got the cooking metaphors baked (sorry? not sorry) into the design.
Put ‘stew’ into IFDB was a quick way to turn up a few more related games, including
- You’ve Got a Stew Going! by Ryan Veeder (2011)
- The Final Stew by Norbez (2025)
- For Pete’s Sake by Jonathan Scott and Stephen Boyd (1993)
- Mushroom Hunt by Ben Jones (2019)
-Wade
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And… from the green room, I can now confirm that both chefs’ dishes have been submitted.
-Wade
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Argh! And of course, right after I submit, I go “wait, this one little tweak to the wording would improve things”…
I still have time before the deadline to resubmit, but I need to resist this urge. I need to let finished be finished.
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The Judges Rubric
Okay, it’s possible everyone (audience and judges) are now off milling around the entrances to the dining room, perhaps comatose from fumes. But I said that I or someone else would muse on dish interaction with the judges rubric.
We’ve made a broad and completist-leaning rubric re: things you can do in IF. To save you revisiting the top FAQ post, I’ve copied it into the summary here. Remember, if you’re an audience member taster-rater the judges will be following it but you don’t have to follow it. But if it does help you, go for it.
Summary
Judges will be providing a numeric score for each of the two dishes produced in an episode. There will be five (5) categories for numeric scoring, with a range of 1-10 per category for a total of 5-50 points per dish.
Categories are defined via a list of questions to be considered when determining the score. Scoring is explicitly based on each judge’s interpretation of the relevant questions, and is specifically to be given in terms of relative score between the two dishes as opposed to an absolute score according to some externally-defined ideal. This means that scores between dishes that are prepared in different episodes (with different judging panels) are only loosely comparable.
The five categories and their questions are:
- Writing
- How effective and engaging is the prose?
- Does the dish have a distinctive narrative voice?
- How well does the output prose flow in response to the player’s commands?
- How well are mood and atmosphere conveyed?
- Do stylistic choices cohere into an overall style?
- Is the story compelling?
- Does the story have satisfying dynamics?
- Is the story thematically coherent?
- Are any tropes used well?
- Are any twists effective?
- Are characters distinct and/or well-drawn?
- Do the characters change over time (in personality or behaviour) if the dish demands it?
- If the PC is a specific character, are default responses in-character?
- Do any NPCs feel like people and not obstacles?
- Does the world convince on its own terms? Examples: Does an inhabited world feel inhabited? An abandoned world feel abandoned? Can the player imagine the world beyond the map?
- Is the PC appropriately integrated into the setting?
- Is there any backstory or lore that is revealed naturally?
- Does the setting change or develop over time?
- Playability
- Is the central play experience interesting and satisfying?
- Do gameplay mechanics work properly? Are they easy to understand? Are they engaging?
- Is the implementation solid? Are any bugs or oversights negatively affecting the dish?
- Is the player’s relationship to the PC clear to the player?
- How novel are any puzzles? Are they appropriately clued? Are they unified with the gameworld?
- Are the map and any navigation coherent?
- Did the first taste of the story make me crave more?
- When I interact with this piece, am I playing, i.e. engaging in a fun and curious manner with the work, no matter if it’s easy or difficult or scary or comedic?
- Design
- Do the design choices add up to a coherent and effective overall design?
- Is there a harmony between whole and parts or does the dish feel lopsided?
- Do the writing and programming work together to cause the fiction’s ideas and feelings to be sustained in the player’s mind?
- Has the chef worked with their chosen platform to best effect?
- Is the player’s relationship to the PC presented consistently?
- Are any tropes used well?
- Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
- Inventiveness
- To what extent has the chef responded to the overall challenge in a fresh, surprising or original way?
- Were game mechanics inventive?
- Was the use of the platform clever, inventive or novel?
- Has the author shown originality within the scope given to them?
- Challenge Ingredient
- How has the challenge ingredient been used? Well? Harmoniously? Sufficiently? Or just incidentally?
- Is the whole dish suffused with the challenge ingredient concept?
Note that many questions are recognized to be applicable to only some dishes, i.e. several questions under “Writing” about characters would be less applicable in a dish that has no NPCs (though the PC also counts as a character). Whether or not this will result in a lower score is highly judge-dependent; in general, the judges are prepared to judge each dish on its own merits, so a well-executed dish without NPCs but with a well-constructed PC should do fine for those questions. Likewise, a “puzzleless” story-oriented game would not necessarily suffer under “Playability” due to a lack of puzzles. However, chefs are advised that, all other things being equal, a better-balanced and coherent smaller dish is likely to do better than a more ambitious but unevenly-developed dish.
Also note, and importantly: Judges will be allowed to choose a winner in contradiction to their numeric scoring. The main purpose of the numeric scoring is to provide feedback about the chefs’ relative accomplishments across the five dimensions that the working group decided were most important for this contest – they have intentionally left room for “X factor” elements not covered by the category rubric to be decisive.
A generalist rubric might be seen to be leaning towards rewarding harmoniousness in, uh, general, but it doesn’t necessarily. Ours does in particular, taking inspiration from the concept of the original Iron Chef TV show.
Note the last category, Challenge Ingredient. While there are few specific musings under it compared to, say, Writing, it’s an important one, as the challenge ingredient (what we’ve mostly called the seed) both inspired the dishes and kept them comparable. Too much diversion from the ingredient or inharmonious use of it will not be highly regarded by the judges. That said, what the competitors have shown us has been very on piste.
Wade’s Anticipatory Rubric Vibes
I’ll comment on the writing because it’s been the biggest area of difference between the two dishes to judge and audience eyes.
I anticipate Pacian scoring well in the writing-characters areas. I suspect his game will present a compelling situation. And we know there will be some in-character responses.
Draconis might very well rank highly in areas like How well does the output prose flow in response to the player’s commands? A tight input-output loop can really hold the player in the fiction. Again, with Draconis’s dish, there’s a lot of “We won’t know 'til we know” factors. My feeling is it’s approaching us in the form of a pretty big basket containing all the eggs.
To push the egg metaphor further (it can take it) my sense of Pacian’s dish is: Smaller baskets, more baskets, and more numerous and smaller unknowns.
Looking to the remainder of the categories, I anticipate everyone scoring solidly across the board.
On that note, this is probably (but not absolutely definitely) my last pre-tasting post. So bon appetit.
-Wade
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Thank you for the generous praise. I’ve leaned pretty heavily into the culinary fiction for my posts, partly because it’s so much fun to keep straining (!) and milking (!) the metaphor until it’s as good as dry, but also because I don’t have the writing and coding experience of you other judges to fall back on.
Judges, all of you, I am honoured and grateful to have been asked to sit with you on this panel. Your insights into the authoring process, each from their own angle, are fascinating and informative. Your posts have given me a deeper understanding of what exactly goes on in an author’s mind while creating a game (especially in the pressure cooker that has been this week of coding and writing), and what the pitfalls and highpoints are during this endeavour. Your wisdom has given me a set of extra goggles through which I will proceed to view the games I’m playing.
Very well put. Now we can only wait and see whose omelet tastes better…
Glad to have pointed you to this amazing game. Intricate puzzles pulled together by a deep backstory.
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The development period has ended.
A truly awe-inspiring performance, from two masters of different styles. Iron Chef Dialog Draconis was as cool under pressure as such a reptilian-sounding handle might suggest, but has produced what promises to be an elegant puzzlebox of pure reason. Premier Challenger Pacian was a whirlwind of activity, sprinkling bits of creative magic like fairy dust throughout an offering that glitters with the allures of farce and intrigue.
Now comes the most difficult challenge of all: the test of play.
As is traditional, the dish from the challenger is offered first:
Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider
AncientTreasureSecretSpider.zip (51.4 KB)
[or play online]
… and the dish prepared by the defending Iron Chef is offered second:
Endymion
Endymion.zip (1.2 MB)
[or play online]
The finished dishes are now released for the audience to enjoy, and the judges retire to contemplate these new creations and issue their scores. We’ll find out their verdict in two days’ time, when audience voting begins at noon UTC on Sunday November 16.
In the meantime, I congratulate our competing chefs, whose exceptional talents have been proven here this week, and who have set a high standard for their successors in future episodes. Stay tuned for their final thoughts as the post-match interviews with both are posted here over the next two days.
And now, a word from our sponsors…
[Audience members are encouraged to discuss the dishes on the audience commentary thread, but please make liberal use of spoiler tags when posting about details of the games!]
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Hooray!
How do we open the zipped files if we don’t want to play online-- I’ve been having some spotty internet issues. For instance, I’m looking in the Endymion file and there’s something called Endymion.aastory that is the only thing I see that looks like a game file. But I don’t know if that’s the right thing or what to open it with.
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After unzipping the contents of the download file, the top directory should contain an HTML file index.html. Opening that file with a browser should start the game for you.
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To be clear, that browser does not need to be connected to the internet.
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Ok, playing Endymion and I confess it is making me sweat. I’ve changed all the word meanings many times and I still don’t have it right. I’ve made things happen (I’ve gotten to all the rooms) but my successes aren’t helping me nail the vocab as much as I thought they would.
Also, it keeps telling me I have unexamined shiny things in my location, but I’ll be damned if I can find them, having examined everything as closely as I can. Gonna take a break and restart it, I think.
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Are you playing each others’ games and regularly slapping your (not each others’) foreheads?
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Playing Endymion is on my to-do list for tonight. Maybe I’ll wear a hard hat to be safe…
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Likewise!
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One done, one to do:
@Pacian’s Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider finished! Onwards to @Draconis’ Endymion!
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I’m in the same boat!
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Now that my work day is over, I’ve played through Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider… but I do have a massage scheduled this evening, so Endymion will have to wait until I get back.
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One issue with the “no testers” rule is that I have to guess for myself which things people will get stuck on. If I get it wrong, the hints won’t handle the actual problems people are having.
I’ve tried to remedy that here. Feel free to include or disregard this in your critiques, since it was provided after the deadline!
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