these busy birds will eat almost anything that falls into their gullet -- what will you feed them? they have their preferences, but people food beats bird food any day of the week!

a difficult, chaotic arcade game. now with local multiplayer support!

controls:

  • left / right: move
  • x / up: grab
  • enter: pause menu (select "options" entry for volume controls)
  • ESDF: movement keys for player 2

features

  • 4 difficulty modes: "easy", medium, hard, and practice
  • 3 different control schemes:
    • solo
    • local multiplayer
    • two-handed singleplayer 
  • 4 challenging maps for 4 different flavors of gameplay


Recommended play order

The game modes combine into a whole mess of different options; here's a recommended playthrough order:

  1. Play through practice mode
  2. Check out the recipe book if you want to see the recipes
  3. Try COOKS:1 MAP:NEST LEVEL:EASY
  4. Try COOKS:2 MAP:NEST LEVEL:EASY -- play with one hand on the arrow keys and one hand on ESDF
  5. Try each of the 4 maps with whichever COOKS and LEVEL settings you prefer
  6. Try to beat MAP:CANON LEVEL:MEDIUM!

#ChainLetterJam

this was made for the #ChainLetterJam! Patrick nominated me; I had fun playing Arithmetic Bounce (my high score on hard mode is 24!), so I decided to try making a game that would feel similarly chaotic.

I took inspiration from the fact that none of the target numbers in Arithmetic Bounce were inherently good or bad; their value changed depending on the current goal. This became the ingredient/recipe idea in linecook: specific ingredients are sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the current recipe. I also liked the chaos and time pressure caused by gravity in Arithmetic Bounce; I've gone for a slightly different but still chaotic spin by giving the player two grabber-claws that are tricky to aim.

the continuation of this chain is: The Witch's Almanac


blog

I wrote about this game's design here. tl;dr: if you allow your game systems to play out as physical processes in the game world, there's a lot more opportunities for the player to interrupt and cause surprising interactions



thanks for playing!

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

linecook-windows.zip 1 MB
Version 4
linecook-linux.zip 780 kB
Version 4
linecook-osx.zip 3 MB
Version 4
linecook-raspi.zip 2 MB
Version 4
linecook.p8.png 47 kB
Version 3

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

Love what you did with the river and sieve maps :D

(+1)

Wow, this is wild! Easy mode was pretty dang hard for me, but as you say, you were going for chaos--you achieved that for sure. Cool mechanical ideas with one button activating both claws, and having the claw that doesn't hit anything causing ingredients to stack up. Creative stuff!