Dine N' Bash

9 People

4 Months

Custom Engine

C++

Dine N' Bash is a fantasy Diner Dash style game which has players bring food orders to customers in an exact order. If players take too long, customers begin to throw projectiles at the player. The objective is to earn the highest letter grade on you can on each level.

Play

Collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of 4 designers and 5 engineers
Modeled and balanced score system using machinations
Developed a level design challenge rating tool using Excel
Wrote design documentation to communicate necessary custom engine features

Contributions

Score System

This model is used to quickly simulate a single level of gameplay. The primary variables I was modifying were the score streak multiplier and the grade thresholds. Grade thresholds existed outside this model.

Player Skill Input

Score Streak Multiplier

Total Number of Customers

Customers by order size

Final Score

To help my level designer create challenge with more intention, I created this spreadsheet which allowed them to input level layouts. The spreadsheet then outputs a difficulty rating for each possible customer order based on that layout. If they wanted a problematic customer, this spreadsheet would make it very easy to create that experience.

In this demonstration, The user is inputting (X , Y) coordinates for game entities in the custom engine. The spreadsheet then reorganizes the order types by the calculated difficulty in ascending order from easiest to hardest.

The far right section is a proposed sequence of customer orders, which also has each row's difficulty adjusted formulaically. Finally, the level's Difficulty Rating is the mean of the AD column.