DinerDash Blog

The Original

By John
04/14/2008 05:00PM We thought for our fourth birthday it would be fun to show you the original game concept for what would become Diner Dash.

Can you help Flo get through the lunch shift in one piece?

Lunch is about the hectic grind of a busy waitress at an understaffed luncheonette. In this case, the waitress is Flo, and she earns her tips at The Last Chance Diner, a windblown 50s-style eatery just off the highway. Over the course of the game, the player has to clear tables, take orders, serve drinks and food, and keep the customers happy and the tips flowing.

The gameplay for Lunch is inspired loosely by the arcade classic Tapper, in which the player has to serve up mugs of beer to a never-ending flow of impatient customers. One of the strong points of Tapper was the simple mechanic of moving to the right place and hurling a beer mug at a waiting customer. Lunch uses a similar core interaction, but layers it with more depth and a lot of character.

A level of Lunch represents a single lunch shift at the diner, visualized as an isometric, top-down view of a restaurant. The level begins with an empty diner counter, clean and ready for the incoming rush of customers. The player the hard-working waitress Flo, and navigates the space by clicking on the area where Flo needs to move. Click on a dirty section of counter, and Flo will move to it, wipe it clean, and reset it. Click on a customer that is ready to order, and Flo will move to the customer, whip out her pad of tickets, and write the order down.

The trick to the gameplay is keeping an eye on the restaurant as a whole, making sure that each customer isn’t waiting too long for his or her needs to be fulfilled. For each diner, there is a series of steps that Flo must follow. First, there needs to be a clean spot where the diner can sit. Then Flo brings the customer a menu. When the customer closes the menu, Flo can move to the customer and take an order, which needs to be brought to the kitchen window. Flo can also bring drinks to the customer, and when the meal is ready, the food as well. Lastly, Flo needs to bring the ticket to the table when the customer has finished.

All of these activities take a certain amount of time, and knowing when it’s time to move on to the next step means scanning the screen and getting several tasks done at once. For example, a customer signals that he’s ready to order by closing his menu. Once Flo takes his order, before running back to the kitchen the player might look around and see whether or not there are other players that are also ready to order. If not, perhaps there is a table that Flo can clean on her way back to the kitchen.

Lunch is all about efficient multi-tasking. The player’s score is measured in the tips that are left for Flo, and the less time that a customer has had to wait, the bigger the tip. On the other hand, if a customer has to wait too long, Flo might just lose a customer and be docked some pay by her boss: Al, the loudmouth short order chef. As the player moves through levels, more and more customers move through each shift, and Al manages to squeeze in more seats, making Flo’s job harder and harder. The customers themselves are procedurally generated, by mixing and matching body parts, so each level has a different set of grumpy, complaining customers to get on Flo’s thin nerves.

A simple game with a proven core mechanic and a cast of humorous characters, Lunch has all the makings of a casual game hit.

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