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The Game

Umaemon's Adventure was developed for a large Japanese food production company called Yaokin
Before starting development we were assigned a budget and a time frame to make a game in. The idea for the game came about by me creating lots of little prototypes of existing games we'd made, in order to find mechanics we could reuse, saving time on starting from scratch. The game was made in this way because:

• We felt the core merge mechanics from Cooking Merge were fun to play
• We wanted to make the game more level-based for the Japanese audience
• We wanted to keep the game in the world they'd created, taking characters and locations from their lore and reimagining / modernising them for a younger, mobile audience
• The game was more of an exercise in brand awareness, giving it large appeal without being put off by the constant requirement to spend or watch ads. this had to be a fun experience for the players in order to monetise them through food products externally

The aim of the game is to serve all the customers per level with the Yaokin food products they're purchasing, similar to how you prepare and serve customers in Cooking Fever. The way to prepare each food product was to merge similar products into another one, until you found the one you wanted. We took this one step further by adding 4 different coloured tables, which focused around how long it took to create a new food product, giving us a total of 36 Yaokin food products in game. This allowed us to:

• Showcase Yaokin's food products as an upsell for their store
• Ramp the difficulty up quickly by asking for products on a later table, slowing down the creation and forcing players to manage their time by starting the box timer on one table while returning to another table to merge and maximise their output
• Purchase Boosters to help 3 start each level and progress to the next
• Earn currency whenever a new product was unlocked, showing off more products, as well as Yaokin character and map locations.

Levels were broken up in chunks of 6, allowing you to earn enough stars to unlock the next section of the map and move up. After gathering Soft Launch data in a number of territories we added one final feature to get players playing, which was a global leaderboard where top players would earn REAL rewards, such as boxes of Yaokin treats sent to their house.

Above you can see the mockup I made into a gif for how the game should work, followed by the actual game as it is in the store now.

      

My Work

This game was made basically because of Cooking Merge, and the fact we could quickly create something similar and then build on it in a short period of time. My vision was to make some that properly reflected their brand and could be enjoyed by people of all ages.

From coming up with the initial game idea, right through to hard launch, I was pushing for the highest quality game with fun characters and cool locations, as well as some little Easter eggs to keep the player searching. Once we had the core functioning with the different tables and characters appearing, the biggest task was balancing the levels to feel challenging yet achievable. There were a number of considerations when doing so::

• The initial tutorial was as hands off as possible, teaching the basics without holding their hand all the way. We wanted to be sure that by the end of the first level the players fully understand what they needed to do
• Structuring a level meant defining how many customers would appear, how many products they wanted, which products they wanted and how much patience they had to wait for them
• Having play tested it a lot myself it was important to get external testers (other members of the studio not aware of the game mechanics) to play test it and give feedback and their level of understanding and the balance of the level
• Once the levels were balanced yet challenging I then had to account for the upgrades the player would purchase via progression, and ensure the levels remained balanced as they progressed
• Finally, we encouraged players to purchase boosters to improve their chances of completing levels by earning more money or getting more time. It was important these boosters made the player feel powerful, without being a guaranteed level completer.
• We only had 36 levels so the balance had to ramp up quickly enough that we could make the later levels more challenging. If I had more time on the project I'd love to surpass 100 levels so the difficulty could be introduced at a slower pace, and more mechanics could be added to challenge the player and keep the gameplay interesting.

Yaokin were satisfied with the game, which they initially found extremely challenging but quickly improved on. It was a fun project for an external client that has so much potential for further upgrades and ways to monetise.