Michael Thomét
Game Designer
The Sparrow Served Danger

This was an overly ambitious mashup of the "spy" and the "cooking competition" genre. In it, you would carefully manage time to produce a multiple-course meal that was cooked well enough to win the competition, then identify and apprehend a counter-operative spy amongst the judges based on clues given by your contact, the announcer. Much of this was gutted for time, and the game stands as a testament to hubris. What remains is the ability to cook food using a hokey rythym mechanic. The food is judged at the end of 12 minutes of play, and if it's satisfactory, you get to choose a judge to accuse. So the core ideas are there, but there wasn't much time for refinement.

The Sparrow Served Danger was developed in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 41 "Combine Two Incompatible Genres". See its jam page here. It did not fit the theme well, in my opinion, and shoehorning it into the theme caused the game to be poorly executed overall. This was a case of my getting really excited about an idea I got while I was voting on themes. Once I had it in my head, I couldn't get it out this time, so I ran with it.

You can play the game here (opens in a new window).

You can download it for Windows as a 32-bit program or a 64-bit program.

This game doesn't explain itself very well on its own, so here's how to play: You move using the arrow keys/wasd and the mouse. Clicking interacts. To cook food, you need to interact with a staging area (each one has an empty dish you need to define). Select a method of cooking and then take the dish with you, following the list of tasks. For most tasks, you need to stage the dish at a cooking station and do a rhythym game style prompt for the number of minutes. Others require you to leave a dish at a cooking station for a number of in-game minutes. You have to make four dishes fairly acurately to win the competition.

The Sparrow Served Danger was made with Unity3D.