Project Summary

Sincerely, Robin is a management, cooking, and narrative game. Play as Robin and return to your hometown to regrow the bed and breakfast left to you by your late grandfather. Cook meals, connect with the community, and forge lasting relationships!

For over a year, I've been working as Lead Programmer and Writer on a team of 8 developers. In May of 2024, we shipped a polished demo of the game under the name Bed and Beakfast. Sincerely, Robin was shown at BostonFIG 2024 where it won Best In Show. Additionally, it was shown at PAX East 2024, GDC 2024, and PAX East 2025.

Contributions

As Lead Programmer and Writer, I am in charge of designing the game's systems, leading QA sessions, holding regular code reviews, coordinating with my team, and developing the game's story. Below are some of my major contributions to the game.

• Implemented a versatile dialogue/cutscene system that used a visual novel style format and was capable of unique animations, event triggering, and camera effects. This system was built to handle three core scene types: customer interactions, in-game cutscenes, and cinematic sequences, allowing for seamless storytelling and an engaging player experience.
• Developed the game's cooking system, which uses recipe Scriptable Objects to allow for seamless implementation. The feature allows for multistep recipes and the usage of food group in the place of ingredients.
• Created a suite of tools for team members across various disciplines, streamlining the development workflow and enabling the efficient creation of content. These tools were designed to enhance collaboration and improve overall productivity.
• Developed and integrated the mail and rent systems, which are key to driving the game's narrative. These systems provide way to track guest interactions and player progress, while also giving the gameplay stakes and making it emotionally engaging.
• Designed and implemented a flexible foraging system featuring weighted randomization, enabling designers to easily define item probabilities through a streamlined data input process. This system allows for fine-tuned control over resource distribution, supporting a more dynamic and balanced gameplay experience.

Dialogue/Cutscene System

The Dialogue/Cutscene System is made to handle three types of scenes in the game: customer interactions, cutscenes, and cinematics.

• Customer interactions involve selecting weighted random dialogue lines for a customer to say based on the current game state and the player's actions. Customers pull lines from assigned pools of dialogue, where each pool corresponds to a specific personality or character.
• Cutscenes and cinematics are scripted dialogue interactions in the game. These dialogue types involve event scripting, information loading, character portraits, animations, unique backgrounds, and more.

Cooking System

The Cooking System involves two interwoven mechanics: flavors and recipes.

• When the player cooks a meal, the ingredients they add determine the flavor qualities of the dish. Every customer in the game has a unique set of flavor preferences, and a threshold that a meal must meet in order to satisfy the customer's palette and request.
• Different types of foods are created based on their recipes, which are determined by the types of ingredients added and the appliance used when cooking. A recipe is chosen using a depth first search algorithm that prioritizes recipes that use more unique ingredients.

What I learned

Key takeaways:

• How to work on and build a large modular codebase to allow for easy scaling in the future.
• Developing easy to use data modification & dev tools streamlines game development across disciplines.
• How to conduct regular code reviews throughout the development process to ensure that the code was maintainable, efficient, and met programming style conventions.
• How to work with large, inter-disciplined teams while being fully remote.