An interesting question...

         So, I was discussing the concept of my game in front of my GM last night, when she looked at me and she asked me a very unexpected question - "Do you think that you have the life experience to make a game about serving and accurately represent all aspects of the food and bev industry?"  This question has had me thinking all night, and thus, I will try and address it here.

          First off, the direct answer is No.  No, I do not have the experience to make this a 100% accurate experience of food and bev.  I've been serving for close to a year.  However, I DO believe that I have enough experience to express myself in a way that is relevant and strong enough to at least give an IDEA about what it's like to people that have never served before.

         She went on to say that in order to completely represent the whole experience, I would have to be in the shoes of all roles - Management, Line, and everything else.  I'd like to address that this game is from a server's point of view, and is not meant to be another restaurant management simulation (although, I think it would be interesting to be able to choose your role, but that would take me like 3 years to make this game. :-P).  The generic roles are Server, Bus, Dish, Line, Bar, Management.  That's a lot of roles, and we're not gonna even go into the sub-classes of these that exist.  Last night I was talking to a girl about when she used to host, there were sub-classes of host such as Controller, Scout, and I forgot what the other one was but it was equally as epic. 

       While I think it would be interesting to have a 100% accurate representation of the Food and Bev industry, I feel like the game would lose focus.  Sure it'd be nice to be able to portray the life of the line cooks, or the dish guy, or the busser in the nit and grit, and oh geez - actually making a game of REAL management - COMPLETELY different beasts of their own.  The game is about what a server has to go through each day at a crappy wage, PRAYING that people will be gracious enough to leave enough money to pay their rent. That all being said, I don't think I can properly pay homage to the whole experience without at least CONSIDERING the complexity of these other jobs.

       Given, I haven't even been serving a year, however, I do believe that I owe it to the industry as well as the people intarwebz to at least ATTEMPT to portray what being a server is like in the only way I know how - video games.  There now, I've come to my own conclusion whilst writing this blog.  Cool beans.

       Since I've written this post, it seems relevant for me to make the call out to people of food and bev to send me messages or write about what they would like to see in this game - from ALL roles.  I will fully admit that I'm quite ignorant compared to a lot of you.  You've seen days that I couldn't even imagine in this industry.  Everything you give me helps me to make the design a far stronger experience for the players that have never lived our lives.  So let em' roll in!


-- IN OTHER NEWS
I went back and redid chapter 3-4 of MJW's avoider tutorial, and am now on chapter 5 :)  I feel like I'm starting to get a grasp on the whole multiple .as file thing, as well as how to call different aspects of each.  It's all pretty exciting to me, and surprisingly, I'm having fun doing it (despite me swearing long ago that I would never code again!)  I don't go into work til 5:15, so Ill have quite a few hours to knock out some chapters.

ALSO SAN-FRAN ON SUNDAY THEN GDC ON MONDAY! WOOOOOOO!!!  I can't wait to meet thousands of people that rock my socks.