space-wizards
Cooking Rebaked
A suggested design for how cooking/chef gameplay can be augmented to allow for more robust roleplay and interaction.
Kind of heat source
I'd like to point out that some type of food (i.e. Breads and meat) cooks very badly in microwave in real life. And also, bread can hardly be made in a pot / pan / grills
It would be nice to have different kind of heat sources such as oven vs. pan / pot vs. microwave vs. grills
However, steak could probably be done either on a pan or on a grill
I'd like to have different recipes using different source of heat.
Progress
I've started prototyping the deep fryer and range (combination of oven and stovetop). It could be used as a future base for this document.
Ingredient processing
Also, it would be nicer to not put an entire fruit/veggie in a recipe but instead having the need to put the sliced or diced version.
Something like : Whole -> Sliced -> Diced
It would require some sprite work
Increasing the downsides of not eating / eating low quality food is absolutely not the way to go about improving Chef. To improve a role, you should not degrade everyone else's experience to force them to engage with said role, people should be engaging with chef as a choice, for either RP incentives or extras, not out of necessity. Hunger is tedious enough as is in the current game, it doesn't add anything and is exclusively a chore, making it more crippling in any regard exacerbates this issue. What if there's no Chef, like most shifts currently, what if there is a Chef but they fail to meet the demand of a hungry crew, what if I'm a traitor and can't afford to visit the Chef, what if I'm working in Atmos and don't want to leave my essential work to eat?
Instead of making the established means worse to force people to go to the Chef, make the complex recipes and new recipes all give unique or appreciable buffs to encourage people to go to the Chef. This way the existing gameplay doesn't get more annoying or tedious, the roundflow doesn't suffer if there isn't a Chef, and people are still given a considerable reason to go to the kitchen.
I would like to thank everyone for their comments here, and I will go through and answer what I can, however I have basically stepped away from applying the above document due to my PRs not being looked at for being added. The small additions I was adding as part of this plan, starting with general heat cooking for bread, was PRed in May, and I am tired of resolving the conflicts waiting for someone to finish reviewing it. I will try to maintain this document as best I can, but the motivation is lacking to try.
Increasing the downsides of not eating / eating low quality food is absolutely not the way to go about improving Chef. To improve a role, you should not degrade everyone else's experience to force them to engage with said role, people should be engaging with chef as a choice, for either RP incentives or extras, not out of necessity. Hunger is tedious enough as is in the current game, it doesn't add anything and is exclusively a chore, making it more crippling in any regard exacerbates this issue. What if there's no Chef, like most shifts currently, what if there is a Chef but they fail to meet the demand of a hungry crew, what if I'm a traitor and can't afford to visit the Chef, what if I'm working in Atmos and don't want to leave my essential work to eat?
Instead of making the established means worse to force people to go to the Chef, make the complex recipes and new recipes all give unique or appreciable buffs to encourage people to go to the Chef. This way the existing gameplay doesn't get more annoying or tedious, the roundflow doesn't suffer if there isn't a Chef, and people are still given a considerable reason to go to the kitchen.
I agree 100%. I have had time to think about it, and going down the buff route is definitely the way to go. Downsides are punishing by definition, and we should get the buff stuff done right before we think about "tuning" with downsides. On the note of being a traitor, I think it would add interesting gameplay if you need to consider eating. You can't just hide in a locker for hours, you need to take care of your body, however I do agree entirely about the roundflow without a chef. Lowpop exists.
TLDR: buffs should be in; Downsides can be discussed later (if at all).