After months of procrastinating by adding more features and content, at last I have actually played the Food Truck prototype… and it is really good!
The character abilities are no longer specific cards, so playing a Job card now opens a menu with lots of things that you can do. Each session is a work day, and you craft and deliver as many recipes as possible for a score. Deliver a meal in one town, and a craving for it will pop up again somewhere else on the map. There’s a lot more cooking in this one.
It’s interesting how this is being built vs. Hex Gambit: Respawned (release date still TBA, but it’s closing in!).
HGR was a definite, green lit project. I had all of the character artwork from the start, and I wasn’t positive how much runway I had or what I was even capable of. So I’d work with a very limited scope and polish it up to shippable. First it was a one map, local multiplayer game. Then something good would happen like the MegaGrant or the publisher, so I’d scope up a little and finish it again. I added more maps, then AI, then campaign, then menus for online. But it was a shippable-looking game very early on.
This Food Truck prototype on the other hand, I want to be able to play as much as possible before committing, and I have no pre-existing artwork. I’ve been leaning HEAVY on the programming side so far, and there’s a few more features I still want to fill in before I start making things look good. I have some concept art, but the game itself is mostly grey boxes and spheres and text at the moment.
So Dev Phase 1 feels like the “get all the ideas in and working” phase. That’s almost finished, and Phase 2 will be “make it pretty.” Hopefully I’m not kicking myself later for implementing so much content before dressing anything up. Phase 3 will be pitch it to publishers and get a roadmap to launch.
So is Food Truck 2 my next project? I think so, it’s definitely fun and worth finishing. My only hesitation is if Hex Gambit finds a large enough audience, I might have to recalculate.