﻿CHEF QUEST
A 2018 RESET 4K ‘CRAPTASTIC’ GAME COMPETITION ENTRY
By Anthony Stiller for Pond Software
Music by Vanja Utne


Welcome to Chef Quest!


Oh no! Chef is out of ingredients and must explore the restaurant's dungeon in the search of delicious monsters to stock his larder. He needs to be quick so it's a one-way journey to the best ingredients to be found on the third dungeon level.


How to Play:
To play Chef Quest you use a joystick in port 2.


Chef starts in the dungeon map screen, in the empty entrance room. Move the joystick left or right to move into the next available room. Hit fire to enter the corridor that leads to the chosen room. You can't go back into rooms you've already been into and you can only go into adjacent corridors.


As you traverse the corridor (and then the adjoining room) using left and right on the joystick you will see treasure chests littered about. Press fire to open a chest when it glows. Most chests contain a healing potion but some are trapped!


As you move to the end of the corridor or room, monsters will likely spring out and attack! Sweet, delicious monsters!


When attacked a combat bar appears below you with a grey marker or two above it and a circle or two below it. A moving yellow cursor cycles around inside the combat bar. The circles below the bar show how many "shots" you have left for this combat cycle and how many you've successfully hit with. When the cursor reaches the end of the bar that's the end of this combat cycle and you’ll take damage if you haven’t locked in all of the attack markers.


When the yellow cursor is directly under a marker hit fire to lock it in. It remains locked in until you hit all the markers, or die.


When you do eventually lock in all markers you hit the monster. A monster flashes white if you don't penetrate its armour and red when you wound it. You always do some damage (even if your weapon stat shows zero stars) and each time you hit a monster you wear down its armour, no matter how much damage you do. So never give up as eventually all foes will fall under your mighty Cleaver of Ingredients Gathering +5!


The markers reset and the end of each combat round as the battle continues.


You take damage if you haven't locked in all markers each combat cycle. Like monsters, your armour wears down with each hit until it can be penetrated. Each monster does a different type of damage type (eg gummi goblins make you all sticky and slow you down). Usually a monster still has to penetrate your armour first before it can start applying its regular damage so your armour rating tends to get ... chewed up a lot. When one of your secondary stats is down to zero stars each successful hit on that stat starts whittling away at your health instead. When your health shows zero stars you die at the end of the next combat cycle. Don't worry, there are plenty more chefs!


When you kill a monster it grants you a small boon to a relevant stat (eg killing a 'Shroom gives you a little speed boost in combat, effectively slowing down the combat bar cycle).


Killing monsters also gives you some delicious ingredients (that somehow always manage to land in your backpack before you have a chance of seeing how much you get). When you die or beat the last room you get a star rating based on how many ingredients you gathered.


When you kill all the monsters in the area you can carefully try the chest if you haven't already opened it or move right and exit. The last room on level 1 and 2 has stairs going down to the next level.


If you die (or finish the game) just hold down fire for about a second to restart.


Good luck!


Your Stats:
Hearts (Health): Your primary stat. Lose all this and you die heroically.
Knife and Fork (Weapon Power): The first of the secondary stats. The higher the rating the more damage you do on a successful attack. You always have some weapon power, even with a zero star rating.
Chef's Hat (Armour): Armour is ablative, always wearing down, but it absorbs all kinds attacks. Regardless of armour or a monster's attack power, monsters only ever do a half-star worth of damage with each successful attack.
Lightning Bolt (Speed): The less stars you have the slower you are, meaning the combat bar moves faster. More stars and you have lightning reflexes so the cursor moves slower, leaving you more time to react. Note that monsters also have speed ratings so when you step up to the next monster the combat cursor speed may suddenly change! Also note that the speed stat does not affect how quickly you move about the dungeon itself (it's so scenic you don't like to rush).
Ingredients (not shown): As you kill monsters you gather ingredients. You never really know how much you get (some monsters give more than others) but you get an idea at the end as your final rating is based on how many ingredients you managed to thwart in battle. 


The Monsters:
Gummi Goblins: Cute, little and chewy, gummi goblins populate the upper level of the dungeon. They are slow and easy to beat, though you’re a big meanie for doing so. Gummi goblins gum you up with their sugary stickiness but killing one lets you coat your chef’s clothes in a layer of crystalised candy.
Jelly Cubes: Wobbly and they taste like lime! Jelly cubes clean the dungeon floor and are nasty when riled. Jellies eat away at your armour with their highly concentrated yet rather yummy citric acid. Conversely, killing them lets you hone your cleaver with an acidic edge.
‘Shrooms: These walking but scrummy vegetables should be poisonous but unfortunately for them they’re not. ‘Shrooms are tough thanks to their fibrous bodies. Getting clonked by a ‘shroom makes you weakened so you do less damage. Clonking one though lets you nosh on some of their invigorating, speed-enhancing spores.
Cucumber Hulk: These crisp and delicious monsters live in the lower levels and are big, mean and, well, actually mainly just mean. Cucumber hulks are so dangerous they damage both your health AND your speed on a successful hit. Best them in combat, however, and you can nosh on them for an instant health boost!


Design Notes: Chef Quest uses procedural generation with the same pseudo-random number seed to populate the dungeon so every trip will (mostly) be the same. This allows you to get better each journey as you learn what’s in the dungeon!


Considerable effort went in optimising the code to make it as compact as possible to squeeze in a lot in 4kb (the final crunched size is 4095kb). Several features have been omitted due to filesize limits. Some standouts are: Displaying which rooms have been visited, clearer indication of what level you’re on, more rooms and levels, more monsters (the doughnut monster was dropped, unfortunately), a special attack that kills all monsters with one blow, a ‘critical’ hit that does extra damage, different weapons, difficulty selection, a title screen, and a game over screen.


Huge thanks to the wonderful Pondies of Pond Software for their ongoing help and support.


Special thanks to Ben Chandler for the Cucumber Hulk idea.


Love always to my wonderful and patient wife, Leah, and my beautiful girls, Ashlea and Brooke.