Credit: GameLab/PlayFirstIf you've ever walked into the electronics section of any given supermarket, you've seen 'em: Cake Mania, Burger Island, Farm Frenzy -- the "casual games." We self-proclaimed scholars of gaming dismiss these humble works as shallow and poorly presented, yet still they remain, proudly wearing their cheap-price stickers. King (or Queen) of these low-budget titles is Diner Dash, which follows the friendly Flo as she maintains a restaurant chain. You run about taking customers to their seats, bringing them food, appeasing them once they inevitably grow irate at your lateness as you frantically juggle your tasks. It's a series that has always been at my peripheral -- Mother dearest likes them quite a bit -- but I had never thought the designs of the Diner Dash developers to amount to much. However, a brush with Doggy Dash, a spinoff of the Diner Dash series, has led me to reconsider my views on these "casual games."
Works by the likes of the late GameLab are unassuming affairs with much more heart than budget. They've simple aesthetics and intuitive gameplay: make hamburgers according to the customers' orders, seat customers in a restaurant, give pets a bath, et cetera. The sort of thing anyone can pick up and say, "Oh, I see what I have to do. This is cute!" I suppose introducing people to games is a merit unto itself, but I'd figured most of these to be equivalent to unchallenging Hollywood film. Well, perhaps many casual games are that way, but some of GameLab's games showed potential for depth that allowed them to have much more staying power than most others in the field.
Credit: GameLab/PlayFirst
Credit: GameLab/PlayFirstOne of the things that first surprised me about Doggy Dash is how, instead of being just a reskin of Diner Dash, it deviates from the formula of its origin series, and understanding the deviations from the original provides for a fascinating study in game design from this scrappy little budget title. Diner Dash's source of depth comes from how you must arrange your customers; they come in groups of as many of six or more, and each person is coded according to the color of their clothes. The chairs are, too; blue person goes to blue chair for bonus points. You can send, say, a green guy to a blue chair if there's no more room, but if you keep using the same chair for the same type, a bonus multiplyer increases. Send blue guys to the same blue chair four times throughout the level, get four times the bonus tip money. Easy, right?
But, uh-oh, it isn't that simple. Our customers have a patience meter (health) that's ticking down as they wait to be served. And we got different types of people; these teenagers eat quick but are really impatient, and these old fellows are patient but take their time to eat. Who to serve first? Wait, no, there's more; we got all these other differing types of people, and various group formations are making it hard to pick seats, and you gotta hire entertainment to pacify them, and they're ordering all these different foods, and people are walking out without paying, and HELP!
Credit: GameLab/PlayFirst
Credit: GameLab/PlayFirstSo Diner Dash isn't necessarily a shallow game. It's an example of a game being intuitive while being complex. A simple game is one with nothing more than what's on the surface; an intuitive one has depth underneath an easily approachable surface. And Diner Dash has a surface without any... complications. Diner Dash looks as decent as a Adobe Flash game from the early 2000s can, and the use of color and communicative animations get the job done, even if it's not quite Hyper Light Drifter-tier. Nevertheless, one can get just overwhelmed by all the stuff going on, and even a perfect player is subject to the whims of chance, as the traits of the incoming customers may decide how many points you can possibly get. All these factors result in sensory overload, which brings us to Doggy Dash, an example of how to improve by simplification.
Usually, an evolution of a formula is achieved by making elements more complex, but Doggy Dash manages to be deeper by being simpler. Instead of having to worry about getting customers of different colors to the same seats for point multipliers, you just have cats and dogs to worry about. Instead of groups of customers to arrange in a fashion you can but hope leaves room for incoming customers, you simply tend to one pet at a time. Instead of having to wait to see what your customers want to order, the pets come in with symbols over their heads saying if they want a bath or a trim or an accessorizing -- usually a combination, in that order. Here we see three factors that make this spinoff an improvement over its predecessor: communication, consistency, control. You know what's going on, your actions don't tend to bite you in the rear down the road, and you don't have to worry too much about unforeseen variables.
Credit: GameLab/PlayFirst
Credit: GameLab/PlayFirstUpgrades demand careful planning. Do you upgrade the various service stations to work more quickly and get you more money? Use a treat bowl to sate the impatience of individual customers? Get an energy drink machine in order to let you finish your tasks more quickly for a period of time? Any upgrades you get result in immediately drastic changes to how you play, and some stages require careful tactics. There's plenty of different pets to deal with: the quick-to-serve but loathe-to-wait poodle dogs and Siamese cats; the patient yet time-consuming dachshunds and Persians; and various oddball types like the noisy Shi-Zu dogs that irk other pets. With all these variables at play, strategizing in the long term is just as important as prioritizing who you give service to first in the heat of the moment. Challenge, strategy, reflexes, and a little bit of luck make for fine arcade thrills; not half bad for a bargain game titled Doggy Dash!
It turned out there was some thoughtwork and fun to be had from tiny little Doggy Dash. Apparently PlayFirst and the Diner Dash team have gone through multiple acquisitions and restructurings; several more Diner Dash sequels and spinoffs have been made, but the series has inevitably moved to the mobile market, where advertisements and microtransactions reign supreme. Ah, well, it was nice while it lasted, and it's still going, in a way; the perennial success of GameLab's games has led to a blossoming market of small gems one can get on the cheap, and there's plenty of fine ones out there waiting to be unearthed. GameLab tends to be a safe bet amooung them, and I was touched to learn that GameLab consisted of young game design graduates who helped people enter the field, as designers and as players. So here's to the little guys and their little games, and to the big importance they have in introducing others to the medium.
