Lazy Susan

Created for The Very Serious Juniper Dev Game Jam.

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Mini Devlog

My initial idea for this game was that you would need to balance everyone's opinion of you: people get mad at you when they are waiting for their food for too long, or when you spin away food as they were getting it.

The lazy susan table concept came from its status as a key fixture from my extended family dinners out growing up. From that, I thought it'd be a nice story element for the seats to be different members of a family with slightly different properties and unique food preferences: your hot-tempered cousin who gets a lot of meat and has little patience but a long reach, and your elderly grandmother who has little reach and whose dentures can only tolerate rice and vegetables.

Then, I thought about having a frame story of different meals to go alongside having different rounds/stages, and slowly adding new mechanics as you age: when you're a 5-year old everyone is patient with you and your help is praised in a tutorial, but as you grow and learn the family dynamics you have more things to balance (e.g. if you don't serve your grandmother first everyone else's temper rises because that's just not done; your cousin may spin the wheel to get the food they want if you're taking too long for them). Plus, a general difficulty bump as people have less patience with you overall. I even pictured the culmination: you as the elder matriarch, getting to be the one to request food while others spin the lazy susan in your stead.

But, I haven't the inclination to do any of that right now (honestly, even joining this game jam at all was a last-minute whim), but maybe at some point in the future I'll pick this back up and do some of that. This is closer to a proof of concept that I could do all that some day; with a scoring mechanic and a timer slapped on it for now to make it more resemble a game.

It is very little and what is there is ... not very good, to be sure, however:

1. it was a delight for me to create even in its limited state, which honestly is the only point.
2.  it is released at all because I am a huge believer in the idea that something done badly and shared with others is thousand times better than a perfect idea crystallized but trapped in one person's mind, so! Have at it, world!

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Built using LÖVE 11.5. Uses Classic module for Lua classes, Aros font, and a modified version of love-deploy for deploying to itch.io.