Flowerpot Games

Pancakes!!!, Flowerpot Games’ newest Android game, is released and we’re really excited.

In Pancakes!!! you go to work building stacks of pancakes and toppings to order. Catch pancakes and the right toppings as the chef flips them into the air, but don’t catch the Burned Pancakes or your customer will leave unhappy. Earn cash and achievements as you complete orders. With over 200 levels, 10+ toppings, and ‘All You Can Eat’ challenge rounds, Pancakes!!! will leave your mouth watering for more.

Pancakes!!! is Released!

Buy the game here: http://bit.ly/PancakesFull

Or try the demo first: http://bit.ly/PancakesDemo

Check out the trailer:

Pancakes!!! Inspiration

There was only one programmer working on the game — the only one with an Android phone, me — so I wanted to make a game that was simple to produce and I wanted it to be something that I’m passionate about. I also wanted it to take advantage of the accelerometer on most Android phones. My first thought for a game was something Tetris-like. However, as I browsed the web I found a literal flood of Tetris clones and I wasn’t about to make another. The bigger issue, however, was that I couldn’t tie a Tetris’ish gameplay mechanic into something that I’m passionate about and I wasn’t so sure that tilt controls would work well for a game like that.

So I looked for accelerometer controlled games to see how others integrate tilt control into gameplay mechanics. I found that some games use tilt to control a player character, like in Super Drill Panic by OrangePixel, or control a target, like the hamburger bun in Sky Burger by NimbleBit. Both of these games are a lot of fun to play — well, I still haven’t played Sky Burger for lack of an iOS device but I’ve seen video and it looks fun. So I let those two control mechanics dwell in my brain for about a month, until inspiration hit.

And then Blamo! One day I took the family to I-HOP and watched an amazing chef flipping pancakes into the air and onto plates. There was the idea for Pancakes!!!, but it didn’t have the Blamo! moment until 2:30am when I woke from a weird dream about some guy tossing Lawn Darts at me and I was trying to catch them. It was then, oddly enough, that it hit me — a chef tossing pancakes and toppings into the air and you, as the player, trying to catch them! It was BRILLIANT! No, it was double BRILLIANT because, yes, I’m passionate about pancakes. Pancakes have been a family tradition since I was a child and I’ve spent tens of years perfecting my own pancake recipe; which I recently learned is exactly like Martha Stewart’s recipe :/

Gameplay and Mechanics

So with an idea in hand I built a quick prototype and did some play testing. But it was missing something. It needed to be more than just stuff flinging into the air and catching said stuff on a plate. It was kinda silly, borderline lame, to just willy-nilly catch stuff and get points. Hmm, it was actually outright boring. It needed start and end points, more gameplay, and game mechanics like bonuses, points, achievements, and (later came) challenge rounds.

This is a video of the prototype. Notice the placeholder art and the awesome chef in the background, hand-animated by me. :p (my artistic skills are *that* good). “Pancake Pandemonium” was an early working title.

Start and End Points

Since the game takes place in a restaurant it’s only natural for there to be some kind of food ticket that dictates what type and quantity of food items need to be caught on the plate. Catching the right food items earns points and bonuses, but catching the wrong food items has penalties. That was a good start because each round of play has a natural beginning and a natural ending, but there was still something missing; the game needed something for the player to avoid. It needed a bomb of some kind that ends gameplay.

Bombs Away

So that night I made pancakes for dinner. I sat in front of a short stack and thought, “what would ruin this stack so badly that I wouldn’t want to eat it?” I jotted down a list of things like spilled coffee, horseradish, tomato sauce, nacho cheese, and burned pancakes. Some of them didn’t really make sense within the context of the game because, why would a pancake chef be tossing horseradish or cups of coffee into the air? With that realization I settled on burned pancakes as the bomb, if you catch a burned pancake the round ends and the customer leaves the restaurant unhappy.

Bonuses

I came up with the idea of using poker-hands to define bonuses; a Pair, Three of a Kind, Four of a Kind, Full House, Straight, etc. I had trouble coming up with food-based analogs for *ALL* of the poker hands, but I got some and was happy with it. It’ll be fun to come up with more, but maybe a little later.

Achievements

It seems that nearly all games have Achievements these days and I briefly toyed with the idea of leaving them out just to rage against the machine. But in the end I realized that the game is for the players, our customers, and to leave out achievements would be doing them a disservice. I had some fun creating the achievements and using OpenFeint to manage the achievements and awards made it a snap. I think the game has a nice mix of easy and difficult achievements. All of them are visible in the OpenFeint desktop, except for the ones that are hidden.

Challenge Rounds

Lastly, and much later in the development cycle (in beta to be specific), someone mentioned that challenge rounds would make the game more fun. So I added a challenge round called ”Catch-as-much-food-as-you-can-without-catching-a-burned-pancake”. That name was quite a mouthful so I shortened the name of the challenge round to “All You Can Eat!”. In this mode, food items fall twice as fast and you have to catch as many as you can. If you catch a burned pancake the round ends, but you keep your points and bonuses.

In that same vein, a beta tester suggested that I add a “Picky Eater” mode where the round ends if you catch a food item that the customer does not want. I may add this mode a little later – I really like the idea.

Art Style

With most of the gameplay and mechanics defined and most of the game coded, Pancakes!!! was in desperate need of real art. So I set out to find an artist – The saga is discussed in some detail on my AltDevBlogADay post titled Evaluating Artists – One Approach.

The art style I envisioned was a mix of Calvin and Hobbs and Hanna-Barberra/Warner Bros. I like Calvin and Hobbs for the crazy eyes and Warner Bros/Hanna-Barberra for the thick flowing outlines and flat shading.

We ultimately chose Karl Prewo of Mythic Monster Studios for the job because he nailed the art style right out of the gate – and his response time was simply epic. He started out with a simple sketch to show the feel of the restaurant, moved on to a line drawing, and then finally coloration. From then on, Karl just ran with it and produced all the beautiful art in Pancakes!!!

From Sketch Art to Line Art to Colored Art

Music

Music was a lot more difficult. I had an idea of what the music should sound like, but it turned out to be rubbish. My very first thought was jazz, then swing, then French Folk music, then finally some weird fusion of German/French folk music that ended up sounding like a sad clown jam at a funeral home. But the musician, Gavin Harrison, was patient with me. I finally admitted that I suck as a musician, gave Gavin some general guidelines, and just let him run with it. He’s the talent behind the music, not me.

What’s Next?

I wrote the first draft of the game doc seven months ago and wrote the first lines of code on July 5th. So Pancakes!!! was roughly 5 months in the making by one full-time coder – me – with only small breaks here and there, mostly around holidays. I’m really proud of this accomplishment. It was so much fun to make this game.

Next, I’ll probably take a short break for about a week or two and then start on the next game. What game that will be is still up for grabs.