Comic Fiesta ’17: Borderline Cooking Shows The Struggles Of The Support Mains Out There

KDU has another booth at Comic Fiesta this year and it continues to impress. But one of the most interesting ones of the many student projects showcased there is Borderline Cooking.

We were recommended to check it out by one of the booth attendees there and it did not disappoint. For the support mains out there, this game captures the frustration and thanklessness you experience in a different kind of gameplay that anyone can pick up and play.

You play as a chef in a party of four adventurers. Right from the start the chef will be ridiculed from the three main DPS classes, the warrior, rogue and mage. Just because. The game is all about supporting your party you cannot deal damage directly. All you can do is gather resources, cook food that grants buffs and healing but be careful, as the party will move without you. Cooking and gathering too much and you’ll get left behind.

The 2D side-scroller forces you to play around the three AI-controlled party members rather than be the main star of each battle. Add that they can move and stop on their own whims without warning, it makes for some on-the-fly decision making, keep gathering ingredients, cook something or catch up with the party?

Once in a battle, you need to support them by throwing the food you cooked to them. The throwing mechanics is a bit too simple however- you hit a button to aim, the trajectory moves back and forth and hit the button again to fling your food. Most of the time, we did not manage to get the food to reach the warrior up in front and he usually dies. Either the game needed more controls to change the arc and trajectory, or maybe have the foods being thrown have a bigger area of effect so you can effectively get all three party members topped up in health.

Of course the game isn’t perfect right now, but considering this is made in just three months as a student project, we were highly impressed. We talked to one of the students involved in the project, he mentioned that the idea started from the concept of “making unheard minorities great again”, or something on that line. Rather than going for the standard people-of-colour approach, they interpret that statement and applied it to the unappreciated support mains’ struggles. It’s always easy to blame healers not healing enough- it’s why the line from Overwatch’s Genji “I need healing!” has reached meme status, because if the team dies a lot and loses, it’s so easy to shift the blame to the supports. Borderline Cooking captures that theme and tells the story all by just using gameplay, something we like to see more in games.

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