In a recent interview, I was asked about my design philosophy for Haunted Chocolatier, and I talked for a bit about my interest in the “intuition”, and using an intuitive process to make chocolates. I wanted to elaborate on that a little bit here.
It’s true that I am interested in the intuition. As someone without formal training in art, music, or game design, I rely heavily on intuition and feeling to do my work. I think it’s where creativity comes from. You can’t really “engineer” creativity… it comes from a mysterious, indeterminate part of our being. But it’s a crucial and important part of what makes us human.
Video games, on the other hand, exist within mechanical devices, and are governed by mechanical laws. They can’t ever truly be intuitive in nature, except to the degree in which they rely on the player as the intuitive agent.
So really, there’s no way to make a TRULY intuitive chocolate making system in Haunted Chocolatier. The best I can do is make it seem intuitive on the surface. But eventually, min-maxers will reverse engineer everything and find out how to optimally game the system. Oh well.
For that reason, as well as my general design philosophy of giving players multiple paths to reach the same goal, I’m going to offer more than one way of making chocolate. There will be a more “intuitive” way, but there are also more conventional ways to do it. There will be reasons to use both, but you could just focus on one or the other if you wanted to. At their core, they are all processes in which you convert ingredients into final products. It’s just that one process might be more “whimsical”, and another process might be more mechanical.
Anyway, I’m probably getting too philosophical about all this. At the end of the day, a game has to be fun. That’s what is most important, and that is always my primary goal. Everything else is secondary. So, keep in mind anything I ever say about Haunted Chocolatier is subject to change if I ever feel like it’s not as fun as it could be.
Thank you for reading, and have a nice day
-Ape
TLDR: There will be more than one way to make chocolate