Massive Gameplay Discussion! How Umami Friends Is Designed.
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Nov 09, 2024 at 09:52:46 AM
How Umami Friends Is Designed.
What’s up Umami Friends! This is a big long dump of notes to give you insight on how Umami Friends is designed. You can use this guide to decide whether Umami Friends is a game for you, or if you are inclined, to help with balance and come up with game ideas! The community is super awesome and I want to offer as many resources as possible to engage everyone.
Key Design Ideas
Decision Web > Linear Build Pathways
I want endless depth in Umami Friends, where feints, trickery, Yomi layers, etc. are more important than straight up build pathways. This is super key to Umami Friends, and keeps the game from ever having one dominant strategy, or just becoming a game that comes down to picking and drafting.
For example, there was an iteration of Umami Friends in 2022 where players drafted and reserved recipes for themselves to buy. You could set up strong strategies that played almost like “decks”, the only thing that you then had to do was execute them in-game.
The cool part about this version was that it gave players clear direction on what to do and allowed them to theorycraft.
The bad part was that the game was coming down to proper drafting. It almost felt like an autobattler, where whoever drafted properly would slowly but inevitably win.
Having both elements is good, but I always want there to be multiple build pathways in UF so you never feel like the game is an inevitability.
Asymmetrical But Not Limiting
The cute chef characters all have a special ability, starting points, and starting recipe. This makes them asymmetric and informs their strategy– but less so than some players may think.
Lots of new players come in from TCGs and think they are going to go for pure builds completely around a character.
In Umami Friends, having Recipes or cards completely off limits to a character is a little too limiting. Fronk starts with a Fancy Burger, and his ability helps him get into Burgers more efficiently than any other character. He can technically get to something like Omegaburger faster than all other opponents.
But if he is up against a savvy opponent, he will feel really bad constantly losing his Burgers to Spicy cards. Fronk may need lots of plants and card draw, and to utilize things like Eggs and Tofu to convert other Recipes into Burgers to get to Omegaburger.
This is intentional by design! Future characters may be more asymmetrical, but for now I want to make sure the focus is on playing the game well, not just being all about character picks.
There is a (soft) Counter Triangle
Offense (Burger) > Economy (Plant) > Defense (Spicy)
So, in most card battlers like Yugioh, Magic, and Pokemon, you’re attacking your opponent directly. This means aggro, or rushing strategies, involve attacking the opponent early to end the game quickly.
A similar system exists in Umami Friends, but it works a little differently than you might expect.
You see, the goal of Umami Friends is not to knock out the opponent, but to build up Recipes to score 30 points faster than the opponent. In this way, the fastest wins aren’t from high attack cards, but instead cards that are easy to build with high point values.
Thus, Burger is an offense play because it’s the fastest way to the win. They offer the most points but are also the most susceptible to attacks.
Spicy Recipes have abilities that attack the opponent. But I didn’t want Umami Friends to be a game that’s all about take-that. If Spicy Recipes were too powerful, the game would be a total slog.
Thus, Spicy needed to be balanced in a way where they are only worth going for in a reactive (defensive) way to counter an opponent’s aggressive move.
For example, you would almost never use Hot Pot (takes 3 Recipes to build) on a Healthy Snack here, the easiest Recipe to build in the game. If you tried to burn all the opponent’s Healthy Snacks, you would simply fall behind, as the Plant type Recipes scale in offering more and more resources as the game goes on.
These Healthy Snacks build into Garden Salad, which give you more card draw permanently. In this way, Plant types are economy – they are an investment for later. This lets you scale into big powerhouse legendaries like Chocoberry Cake.
However, they lose to Aggressive Burger strategies, because many of the Plant Recipes give a short-term benefit to the opponent, like on Healthy Snack, the opponent gets an extra Ingredient for their turn. This means the aggressive player can get to many important Recipes before the Plant player is done getting set up.
Taco
What’s the deal with Taco and Sweet?
Getting 4 Taco types together for a Taco Party is meant to be difficult, and thus the Recipe is generally better than Plant / Spicy / Burger.
However, I don’t want the game to come down to just drawing through the deck to make Tacos every time!
Thus, Tacos are meant to be strong in the presence of other Recipes. For example, combining a Garden Salad (+1 Max Refresh) with a Taco Party = Taco Salad, worth (+2 Max Refresh). Receiving an additional Max Refresh for picking up 1 Taco Party is meant to be very good. However, it does come at a cost.
Taco Salad changes your Garden Salad from an Advanced Plant into an Advanced Taco type instead. Advanced Taco type cannot be used for Great Leaf, a very strong Legendary Recipe. Besides Massive Burrito (which gets most utility earlier in the game), Advanced Tacos are often going to be dead ends on your board, so choose to upgrade with Tacos wisely.
Sweet
Sweet is meant to reflect how much of the deck you have drawn compared to your opponent. They scale, so the bigger the split of Sweets to you vs your opponent, the better!
Since Sweets automatically come out of your hand at the beginning of your turn, their turnover increases with +Max Refresh. Thus they are meant to be a good lategame wincon for milling through more cards than your opponent.
Counters are meant to be Soft
Have you ever played a video game, where an enemy is designed to be literally invulnerable or impossible to beat? Or you come upon impassable terrain, or a door that can’t be opened? I never liked this feeling– I liked at least feeling like there was a chance at beating an enemy, no matter how poor the odds.
I didn’t want any build pathway to be completely shut down 100% of the time. For example, let’s say you really love Fronk and Burger Rushing. Spicy is meant to counter you, but shouldn’t mean your lose rate is 100% against spicy. Alternative build pathways and RNG should be options to flex into.
Set Collection + Manipulating RNG is key
You can think of Umami Friends as having some Poker / Texas Hold’em influence.
The Rare Recipes are shared information, or “streets” (Rare Recipes as pathways to winning).
The ingredients in your hand are Hidden Information. The ingredients you save on your board are visible to all. Thus, you roughly know the chances of how fast you vs your opponent can get to a Rare Recipe on the board first.
This is the entire balance system behind Umami Friends. This chart is the likelihood of drawing into Recipes. As you can see, it’s actually quite low. The numbers are a little misleading, because you actually have a ton of ability to manipulate your odds, you get to see lots of cards with sweet turnover, etc. But you get the idea:
Thus, there is lots of room in the game design to make deliberate reservation of certain ingredients super rewarding.
See Shinra’s special ability – getting 5 Spicy together by chance is extremely low. However, spending multiple turns reserving and milling for Spicy cards on your board may be worth it if it means something like stealing a Fruit Sando (a 20 point swing!).
You can see there’s a ton of design space here and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Note that the most important design piece is that strong abilities need to reflect deliberate planning or have costs that require late-game amounts of card draw, so that one player doesn’t just auto-win by getting the hand by accident except in extremely rare cases.
Balancing Progress
Want to help balance and tweak Umami Friends? Here are my main design flaws and ideas to fix them so far. I really appreciate all the community ideas and feedback already!
Hitting 30 Points can be Unclear / Anticlimactic
Scoring can be anticlimatic on boards where there are just too many small Recipes to know if you clearly hit 30 points or not without stopping to total your score.
Solution 1: Rewarding Consolidation of Recipes
It is way easier to count fewer recipes. Which string of numbers is easier to total at first glance?
8 + 8 + 10 + 10 = Easy to Calculate
6 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 4 +2 +2 +5 +1 +3 +2 +2 +1 +2 = ??? What?
With this fix, there would be no core gameplay mechanic changes. I would just make it always worth it to evolve your Recipes, preventing players from chilling with a ton of Commons on their board.
I want to make sure beginners hit 30 and feel rewarded by building from the top → down on the market. Seeing things like 8 - 10 points on a Big Recipe is a good thing since it makes players backwards engineer build pathways.
I think Ingredient and Sweet point scaling is fine; the “chunking” of all the Ingredients together on the board is really easy to lay out, 1 stack for sweets, 1 stack for ingredient cards. Pretty easy to total.
Other Ideas:
- Change any abilities that give you Umami for every Recipe on your board --> Umami for every Advanced Recipe on your board. This would prevent Basic Recipe spam from clogging the board and being hard to read.
- Add a way to tech Advanced → another Advanced with a really good ability to extract a little more value from existing builds.
- Make point values on cards and characters very deliberate to reflect getting to 30:
- 0 points on Healthy Snack / Spicy Ramen
- 2, 3, 5 points on the majority of cards and scaling abilities
- 10 points on some Advanced Rares, etc.
Solution 2: "Special Recipe" Rares Trigger Endgame
Adding a symbol to Rare Cards where once a certain amount of Special Powerful Advanced / Legendary Rares are picked up, the game ends and points are totaled from there.
The Good: The end of the game would be very obvious and the race to the special Recipes would be epic.
The Bad: You would still have to total your points before picking up the final Rares. If you are losing on points you’d have to avoid picking up Rares to stretch the game out to win, which would feel bad. This could be remedied via game balance but I'm not sure.
Potential Common / Basic Rework
I thought I would never change these core Recipes again but here we are. I am thinking about editing Spicy Ramen, Fancy Burger, and Garden Salad.
The problems I'm looking to fix:
Fancy Burger can feel like a bit of a dead end with a small max hand size. It can be hard to make a Fancy Burger, and there is no energy or ability to reward you for doing so. Burgers are meant to score points and not encourage card draw, so this design was intentional.
It feels like there isn't enough forward momentum.
Spicy Ramen's ability text is chunky compared to all other Common Recipes. It can be a barrier to entry to really light gamers who find the text intimidating.
New version ideas:
Fancy Burger: Ability: Place +1 Ingredient from your hand to your board.
This gives the Fancy Burger player a chance to set up their next turn. It is also synergistic with Megaburger, who gives you +1 Umami for every Ingredient on your board. It gives you a fun choice of saving the ingredient on the board for points, or to use it in your next Recipe.
However, this ability is really good. In order to make game decisions interesting, it needs to be a worse choice than buying Healthy Snacks in some games. This means Spicy and Plant both need a buff.
Spicy Ramen: Name a type. If the opponent has that type, they discard it from their hand or board. If they do not, they show you their hand.
This not only shortens the ability text a bit, but its also a buff to Spicy Ramen. It would allow you to invalidate the Burger player's stashed board Recipes.
I'm considering also giving Spicy Ramen Energy, meaning you can go again on your turn. I'm a little hesitant because this could be oppressive. I don't want to turn the game into a slog where you always choose to attack the opponent -- it should be a strategic choice.
Garden Salad: +1 Max Refresh. Draw +1 (or +2?) Ingredients.
Plant route needs a buff if Burger is passive placing cards. Plant should always outpace the amount of cards seen compared to going Burger over time. This adds a fun strategi choice-- you could hold 3 Healthy Snacks and then evolve them on a key turn to string together a strong combo. This would be really good with Sasha.
Community Ideas
Lots of you have tons of awesome, creative ideas for new Recipes – breakfast Recipes, regional cuisines, and other cool stuff! I’ve been paying attention to all of those and I’ll be making a separate list of those somewhere else.
For now, these are ideas that are focused on core gameplay / balance changes:
Reserve Recipes / Denying Rares / Store Turnover
This is often mentioned by the community – I have been secretly working on these behind the scenes. You’ll see this mechanic coming up more in the future. Stay tuned.
Trash 2 or 3 ingredients (default turn)
This is super awesome! Right now, the best way to alleviate a stuck hand is to Draw 3 over your hand limit, and then during the Refresh phase, discarding 3 cards you don't want. However, some players still feel stuck with bad hands. Being able to trash and redraw may help new players a ton.
I think the only downside to this is more shuffling of the Ingredient deck and it skews the frequency of Sweet draw, so I might have some rebalancing to do. Otherwise Draw 3, Trash 2, Place 1, sounds good to me.
Egg Stack (5)
Increasing Egg Stack size to prevent a Damien player from hoarding Eggs to deny the draw pile.
Tofu Stack (3)
Making Tofu a permanent stack, just like Eggs!
I've played with this idea in the past. It is dangerous because it can give some first turn advantages. But also it can really alleviate some pain when you are stuck building the wrong Recipes! There are pros and cons to this and needs more testing.
Character / Point Buff Synergies
In the version where the game ends due to a certain amount of Special Recipe pickups, characters could have point bonuses affiliated with these special Recipes. This is really cool. Only downside is that it may make scoring difficult again.
Resources
This got really long!
Here is a link to some nerdy numbers and a spreadsheet I use to make the cards.
I'll be back to talking about stuff like Shinies and Art for the rest of the project. We only have 3 full days left! (11/12 is the last full day). Commenting here, shooting me an email, or hopping on the Discord are the best ways to get involved in game balance before everything is finalized.
We are on our final stretch and I couldn't be more grateful for you all! Thank you!
