Overview
"Sarmale" is a cooking game with an emotional twist, the player-character is gay and is trying to avoid coming out to his grandmother. Rather than presenting a scenario in which the player character, who is gay, manages to come out to his grandmother, I wanted to tell a story where secrets are kept to preserve the status quo, highlighting a difficult reality for myself and those like me that are worried about ruining their relationships with their extended families.
I was the lead writer and game designer on this project, and acted as a director. All of the minigames were storyboarded by me, and designed by myself and the rest of my team of 4. The entire script was written in Romanian and English, offering translations to the player as the grandmother's dialogue graces the screen.
Although for most of the game options are given after the grandmother speaks, the player must sit with them during the last minigame. At this point in the game, the dialogue reaches its most intense and pointed questions, and I wanted the player to have to sit and consider their options the way a person might in real life.
Much inspiration was taken from "Cooking Mama," a game that I had left since I was a child. I wanted to capture this experience in the form of a cooking game, but in a slower format, because I wanted to capture the meditative and pensive act of cooking.
Along with design, I also acted as a programmer in this project, helping to implement the dialogue with the minigames in order to improve game feel and hit each narrative beat at the correct time.
