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Meal Time! Game Concept Lucien LeMenager Kevin Mann Robert Doyle
Working Title
Meal Time!
Project Thumbnail A game based on turn-‐based trading card games, Meal Time! pits players against each other to crown the best vegetarian! Players must cook recipes by collecting and playing ingredients while trying to meet their daily nutritional needs. Head-‐to-‐head competition gets fierce when players target each other with special action cards! This game teaches vegetarian players what constitutes a balanced meal plan, all while maintaining an air of fun and competition.
Target Users Our target users are people who are or wish to become vegetarian, or people who live with vegetarians, but don’t know how to create a balanced diet.
Needs Analysis
Problem Statement • It can be difficult for vegetarians to find a variety of healthy foods that they can eat.
o Friends and family of vegetarians may not know what they should buy.
o Those who are looking to become vegetarians might not know what options they have.
• Even if vegetarians know what they are allowed to eat, they might not know what sort of variety they need in their diet.
• Different situations can make it difficult to find / buy the foods you want
o There might be restricted access to foods for college students on a meal plan.
Learning Objectives 1. What constitutes a balanced, vegetarian meal?
• What to replace meats with?
2. What constitutes a balanced daily meal plan?
3. What kinds of recipes are vegetarian-‐friendly?
• Vegetarian versions of meat dishes
• Meals created with vegetarianism in mind
4. To show what nutrients many common foods have.
5. To teach players that they should aim for 100% of their daily value.
• Going too high above 100% is not good.
Hypothesis By playing this game, people who are or may be looking to become vegetarian, or have friends and family who are vegetarian, will be shown different vegetarian-‐friendly foods and recipes, and will learn how to maintain a healthy and diverse diet.
Task Analysis
Objectives 1. To quickly identify basic dietary needs
2. To identify what foods fulfill these dietary needs
3. Promote good eating habits
o Presented through information rather than interaction
o Familiarize players with healthy foods.
4. Teach players what nutrients foods have.
Steps to Take
1. Show players basic recipes with common ingredients.
o Shown through the three recipes to fill.
2. Show players there can be variety even within the same recipes
o Allow players to use different foods of the same group when possible.
3. Have players practice “making the recipe” by playing cards to fit them.
o Become familiar with what goes into recipes.
4. Have players practice counting nutrient values and knowing what to look for.
o Done through scoring at the end.
5. Teach players what nutrients foods have.
o Nutrients are critical to the game, where they count as the score.
User Interface and Environment This is meant to be a physical card game, playable wherever the players choose.
Game Elements:
• Player hand • Draw piles
o Recipes o Ingredients
• Discard pile • Cards
o Pictures o Serving size o Nutritional Facts
• Game mat to show players where piles of cards go.
Interactivity The majority of interactivity will take place in a multi-‐player card game. Players must combine various base foods, represented on ‘ingredient cards’, into recipes by following the requirements shown on ‘recipe cards’. Ingredient cards will display the name, food group, and nutritional statistics (carbs,
fats, etc.) for each food. Each recipe card will contain instructions on how to complete each recipe; for example, a Grilled Cheese card might require any bread card and any cheese card. Players race to complete recipes to earn points.
Players get to see the recipes and ingredients in front of them. They practice counting their daily nutrients in scoring.
Gameflow/narrative Each game consists of a pre-‐determined number of rounds, and the winner of the most rounds is the winner of the game. Every round starts players with three recipe cards in play, drawn from the top of the recipe deck. Both players will try to make the healthiest version of these recipes. Players draw a hand of seven cards from the draw pile and play begins. On their turn, a player can perform up to three actions including: placing an ingredient on a recipe, discarding an ingredient from their hand and drawing a new card, or playing an action card. Players must complete recipes by placing ingredient cards to make a healthy meal. Action cards can be played to hinder the opponent or to protect their own meals. Used action cards and discarded ingredients are put into one discard pile; if the draw pile runs out, the discard pile is shuffled and becomes the draw pile. At the end of the turn, players refill their hand to seven cards. Then, the opponent takes their turn.
The round ends when a player declares “Meal Time!” A player can only end the round at the beginning of their turn (before they perform any actions). At this point, play stops and both players calculate who has the best set of recipes. For each aspect of their ingredient cards, they add up totals from the ingredients of all three meals, and whoever has closest to 100% wins. If either player goes above 110%, they automatically lose that round. In the case of a tie, the higher percentage wins. If there is still a tie, no one receives a point for that value. After all points are calculated, whichever player has the higher point total wins the round
Players can choose to play any number of rounds and with any number of meal cards (three is recommended).
As time goes on, we would plan on releasing expansion packs to be used based on different themes. The expansion decks would focus on a specific restriction such as a gluten or nut allergy. Other restrictions could include foods that would be in a college dining hall or having a vegan date.
Example of Gameplay
Mark and Chuck draw the recipe card. They have drawn “Toast & Cereal,” “PB&J,” “stir-‐fry” recipe cards. Toast and Cereal consists of Cereal, milk, and bread with optional jelly (fruit). PB&J consists of Peanut, Bread, Jelly, and optional fruit. Stir-‐fry consists of Protein, rice or noodles, and vegetables (as well as up to two additional vegetables).
Mark goes first, playing wheat bread, peanuts, and strawberry jelly on PB&J. Chuck goes next, playing wheat bread and peanuts, and plays the action card spoil on Mark’s wheat bread, discarding the (now moldy) bread. Mark replaces the wheat bread with white bread, and plays two more ingredients. Play continues until Chuck has filled all of his required slots, and decides to call “Meal Time.” They both add up the total percentage for Protein across the ingredients in all of their meals. Mark has 95%, and Chuck has 98% so Chuck would win the point for Protein. They repeat this for the other five values, and then check who has the most additional ingredients.
Paper Prototype
Construction To prototype, we made a low fidelity version of the game with cards on regular printer paper. After making a list of desired ingredients and recipes, we chose only some of them to be printed.
Iterations During the development phase, the game changed drastically from making meals for a week to what it is now. Originally, we intended for players to have their own decks and fill their own meal cards. The game would have been a race to fill a certain number of meal slots, at which point the player with the healthiest meal plan would win. Under this version, there would have been restriction cards that limit what ingredients could be placed in the round. Restrictions could have included allergies or vegetarianism, and there may be one to three restrictions per round. This game could have become very unbalanced, with one player finishing all7 meals and the other finishing only 3 or 4. The restriction cards would have made the game too difficult. We considered lowering the number of meals to be made, focusing on three meals a day and a snack slot in which the player could place any food. This version would still have been complex and would not have solved many problems.
When we decided to focus our game, we dropped the restriction cards, and decided to make the game vegetarian. We discussed how the game would work with players having separate decks, and how the separate decks could unfairly give one player an advantage. Instead, we decided to have one deck, which both players would draw from and have both players trying to fill the same recipes. At this point, we needed to add more game elements, or risk the game being completely luck of the draw. We added action cards to disrupt opponent’s meals and protect the player’s own meals.
Future Directions Seeing this version play tested multiple times, we would want to further simplify the statistics of the ingredients to a five star system rather than percentages, with stars filled in to represent how much of a nutrient is in the food. We would consider different “editions” of the game, with decks to represent the different allergies and lifestyles not encapsulated in the game, suck as allergies or veganism.
Delivery Platform and Justification This game would work best as a physical card game much like Apples to Apples or Munchkin. It would be easy to produce and sell, and could sell expansions in related places, like supermarkets. The drawback, however, would be that we have little real-‐time information to assess the game.
Technology, Tools, and Media A physical card game would require decks of cards for both ingredients and recipes, as well as an instruction manual. The visuals on the cards can be created using 2D image editing software like Photoshop.
User Assessment As players continue to use the game, we will gather data on the nutrients of the meals they make via points earned. We would expect to see improvement in scores as players learn to recognize healthy choices.
Assessment of the game’s real world effect would require players to volunteer information about meals they have eaten. On the menu, players would be able to submit information about meals they have eaten, and be able to see what other users have eaten recently, including featured meals. With this information, players will be encouraged not only to eat better, but to share their meals.
Evaluation and Assessment To evaluate if our game is effective, we would create a pre-‐ and post-‐test for focus groups. The tests would consist of multiple choice questions and open response to gauge play tester’s knowledge of nutrition. Along with the factual portion of the post test, we would also ask opinion questions to see what play testers thought of the educational and entertainment value of the game.
Some example questions could include:
Which of the following is acceptable in a vegan diet? (Multiple choice)
Describe a nutritious meal you ate in the past week. (Open Response)
This game was fun to play. 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7(Strongly Agree)
Pictures
Recipe cards
Three ingredients
The Three Types of Cards
(Action, recipe, ingredient)
Initial Setup and Hands
After three turns
