An interactive fiction game about twenty-something siblings cooking together.
Full video playthrough
Siblings Who Stew Together started as a mobile game for my school’s ‘App Factory’ module. Starting out, I identified some key areas I wanted to improve in: hand-drawn 2D art and choice-based narrative in Ink. Since that is a lot to learn, I chose a story subject close to my heart: two siblings using (or attempting to use) cooking to decompress after a day’s work.
I mapped out the script and all its choices in Twine to get an idea of the story’s layout before transferring it to the Inky editor. The majority of my challenges during this project arose from getting Unity to parse the Ink file correctly: getting cutscenes to trigger at the right times, taking away the player’s ability to advance the story while in a minigame, etc. With the help of my tutors, online tutorials, and the advice of the (very welcoming) Ink community, I overcame those challenges and learned a lot that I would apply to future projects.
As someone who was just starting to sketch more regularly at the time of developing this game, I needed an art style that I could produce a lot of assets in quickly, resulting in the cartoonish, hand-drawn look you see here. I wish I had not underestimated the amount of time I spent coding around the Ink file, so I could have had time to add more animations that made have made the player’s actions more readable (shaking the spices into the chilli pot comes to mind).
I once again had the opportunity to collaborate with some great composers on this project. I provided them with a brief detailing the tracks I needed, what they would be used for in-game, their mood, and some references from the world of games and film. Beyond that, I let them have free reign over the music, as their expertise in that field far outweighs mine. I only pushed back on a track if I didn’t feel it fit the mood outlined in the brief, and then I tried to be more specific about what I meant in that brief. They were both incredibly professional and I would love to work with them again in the future.
