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Pizzapocalypse-Artist Statement
In the early stages of conceptualization, my team and I knew that we wanted to make a hyper-competitive pizza game with supernatural elements. Our core design values were to make a game that was funny, frantic, and largely unpredictable, with players being bombarded with disasters that they must overcome in order to satisfy their pizza-making duty. In order to achieve this, we looked to the TV show Cutthroat Kitchen as a prime inspiration. We found the element of sabotage to be exciting and easily translatable to game design, and so we decided upon the element of sabotage as our guiding design principle throughout development.
With this in mind, we looked to Diner Dash and Tetris Attack in designing our gameplay mechanics. We wanted to merge the traditionally leisurely time management of Diner Dash with the disruption component of Tetris Attack. We recognized games of this nature function best when you’re constantly keeping tabs on what your opponent is up to, and so we wanted to be sure that players were properly incentivized to look beyond their own side of the screen.
In order to achieve this, we strove to make the process of making pizzas and serving customers to be mechanically simple so that players enter a state of flow, in which they can seamlessly balance running the restaurant and keeping an eye on their opponent. We also introduced a combo system where the more customers players serve in quick succession, the higher their combo and the more money they earn, pushing them closer to victory and helping them progress towards using their saboteur. This leads to a satisfying loop of finding the flow, finding your opponent’s flow, and disrupting theirs before they can disrupt yours.