A Not-So-Little Place Called DinerTown - PlayFirst Grapevine

Did you know?
Did you know that Flo, Quinn, Darla and Mr. Big all live in a not-so-little place called DinerTown? Did you know that the DinerTown neighborhood where Flo’s Diner sits is called "Avenue Flo?" Did you know that the menacing Mr. Big runs Big Corp, DinerTown’s biggest corporation, and that Big Corp is where Flo worked before she quit her job to open her diner? Did you know that Flo has a Golden Retriever named Skillet who likes to go jogging with Cassie’s dog, Phoenix? Did you know that Flo and Quinn are roommates, and that Grandma Florence calls her car the FloMobile? Did you know that Donutville is the next town over from DinerTown?

If you knew all these things then maybe you should have my job, because these are the kinds of little details that you carry around in your brain when you’re in charge of game design and creative content at PlayFirst.

Introducing Parking Dash™ and Karma! DinerTown’s newest heroine
For our latest entry into the world of DinerTown, you’ll meet a young upstart from Donutville, a heroine who’s a bit younger and a lot more disorganized than Flo and Quinn, who comes to couch surf in their DinerTown apartment just until she gets her feet on the ground and her parking lot business up and running.

Parking Dash is a time management game with a healthy dose of puzzle play.  We’re always excited to find creative new game ideas and were psyched to partner with Kef Sensei when they brought us this clever time management-puzzler idea. And the minute we saw the game—we knew it belonged in DinerTown!

We call it a story world
DinerTown is what we at PlayFirst call a “story world.”  We are hard at work on quite a few story worlds right now (including the mesmerizing Dream Chronicles Realm— just wait until you see Dream Chronicles 3!—and the delectable Chocolatier Collection -- watch out for Chocolatier III this winter!), but Flo’s DinerTown was our first story world and the one our internal studio lives and breathes every day.

Who doesn’t love stories?
I love stories. Who doesn’t? When I was a kid, I was a comic book nut and now, as an adult, I admit that my addiction is even worse.  In my house, much to my wife’s displeasure, I have an entire walk-in-closet filled floor to ceiling with comic books. My office is no better. My background is in art and design and music, but when I first started working in games I was lucky enough to work on  titles that had strong dedication to characters, narrative, and story. I worked as a game designer and later as a creative director on kids games with robust story worlds like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Reader Rabbit, and The ClueFinders. When I got to PlayFirst, I could tell right away that we were going to build a story world or two of our own…

DinerTown started with Flo
When I first joined PlayFirst as employee #3 (back in September, 2004!) we decided that our portfolio of games needed a guiding vision. We determined that our vision would be to assure that no one playing a PlayFirst game would ever ask the question, “Hey, um, why am I playing this again?” This led us very naturally to games with stories and characters in them. After all, what better motivation for finishing a level or a restaurant than finding out what happens next in the story?

We also wanted stories and characters that were rich in detail and surprising to the player—we weren’t really looking for dragons, spaceships, or ancient tombs, we wanted to stand out in the market with stories that were more in touch with the every-day. We wanted to offer the casual player characters that they would love and identify with.

Luckily for us, the first game we were working on, with Gamelab, was a little project then called “Lunch.”  “Lunch,” of course, matured into the first Diner Dash game, and the character designs for Flo were perfect.  Flo is someone you could know, someone with flaws, someone who isn’t a super model, or a bimbo, or an action hero. Flo and Diner Dash ended up being the Platonic ideal of what we were shooting for with our portfolio of games—and of course, Flo and Diner Dash hit a bull’s eye with casual players worldwide.

So, then what?
Flo was a superstar! But what do you do with a big hit game? Sequelizing Diner Dash turned out to be a bigger challenge than we thought. We designed and developed Diner Dash 2: Restaurant Rescue here in PlayFirst’s internal studios and it’s in DD2 that you first get a hint of the larger world around Flo’s Diner and the surrounding environs we now call DinerTown.  You also meet a broader cast of DinerTown’s entrepreneurial restauranteurs, and you even meet Mr. Big. We kept building the town we’d created, bringing Darla back for Diner Dash: Flo on the Go, and then we blew out the Dinertoon cast of characters much further with last year’s Diner Dash: Hometown Hero.

The DinerToon Characters
With each new Diner Dash game we do, we are constantly expanding the cast of DinerToon characters.

As we were developing Wedding Dash, we decided to bridge the world of Flo and the world of Quinn, so we made them opposite characters. As one of our game designers put it, “If you have Cookie Monster, why do you need Muffin Monster?” Quinn is delicate and traditional and makes dreams come true, Flo is down to earth and iconoclastic – and she makes…lunch.  Of course, to add some story tension, we made them roommates. 

The DinerTown story world provides a way for us to build from a single character (Flo) to an ensemble cast of characters, like Grandma, Quinn, Bobbi, Cookie, Scarlett, Walter, Cassie, Darla, Coco, Karma, and Jo the jogger. Karma comes from Donutville, but we’re working on a game now starring Jo the jogger where you’ll uncover more about all the cities around DinerTown, from Puddington to Muffinberg, and even the daunting Meatropolis.

Breaking out of the diner
Building a story world out of DinerTown has enabled us to expand the world of Flo in interesting places—places it wouldn’t have gone if we’d just stayed in the diner. For the folks who are making games here at PlayFirst, DinerTown is way more than just a fictional neighborhood; it’s an overarching story world to dive into and a neighborhood of game design and game play opportunities to explore.

Quinn’s Wedding Planning Service, Flo’s Diner, and the DinerTown Pet Shop all line the streets of Avenue Flo, but out of that world we were also able to work with our talented partners to dream up hit games and stories like Cooking Dash, Wedding Dash and Pet Shop Hop and tie them into a comprehensive narrative while taking the stories in new directions. When it’s working right, DinerTown and Flo’s gang of Dinertoon buddies act as creative catalysts for new game play ideas and new game/narrative opportunities. We’ve put our imaginations to creating a story universe where the starring characters of each game can “team up” (sorry, no super-powered fist fights high above the city skyscrapers) and offer interesting situations and scenarios around which to build great, fun games.

And here’s some insider information: over the next few months, we’ll be revealing some exciting new ways for players to enter and play in the DinerTown story world.

How do I get to live in DinerTown?
Building story worlds is no easy task—it takes a lot more than cartoon bricks. It takes imagination, great characters, and super-talented people. I feel very lucky to come into work every day and concentrate on things I love—like game design, story, audio and art direction—and work with such a talented and dedicated group of lunatics. Check out our current Career Openings if DinerTown sounds like the kind of place you might like to spend your days. Who knows, there might be a store front on Avenue Flo with your name on it! Though we owe Flo a lot around here, it still takes real people to breathe life into fictional ones. Everyday heroes. People you could know, people with flaws, people who aren’t super models, or bimbos, or action heroes. People who believe in hard work, DIY, and perseverance. 

Kinda like Flo.