Every spring, the village sends someone up the mountain to the dragon. This year it's Pim Quendel, eleven years a dishwasher, who knows every cookbook by heart and has never cooked a meal. The dragon doesn't eat him. It hires him.
Hand-painted point-and-click adventure, in development
The story
Dinner is served. Eventually.
Pim's little kingdom cares about food more than anything. People greet each other with “Well fed?”, quarrels are settled over stew, and the highest rank in the land belongs to the certified cook.
Lower Crumbling has sent an offering up the dragon's mountain every spring for two hundred years. Nobody ever came back, and nobody ever asked. The Sacrifice Committee runs it all properly, with forms, deadlines and a cake for after the ceremony. By pure coincidence, the person chosen is always whoever annoys the village most.
This year that's Pim. Before he can be sacrificed, he still has to get his paperwork stamped.
Up on the mountain lives Ingrimm, the most feared dragon in the realm, who burned his own tongue three hundred years ago and hasn't tasted anything since. He doesn't want an offering. He wants a cook.
“Then cook. Tonight. Anything that tastes of anything.”
Ingrimm, to his new staff
Painted by handEvery room is a full storybook painting, packed with odd little details from a country obsessed with food.
One click does itLeft click acts, right click looks. No verb bar.
No deaths, no dead endsYou can't lose anything for good, and you can't get stuck.
Everything answers backTry any item on any person or thing. There's a reply for it.
A hint bookWhen you're stuck, ask Grubwald's Complete Kitchen, all fourteen volumes.
People worth talking toConversations change as the story moves on, and everyone has a story of their own if you ask.
Early reviews
What the locals are saying
★★★★★
“Ewald should have worked on this. He is good at polishing things.”
EwaldSquire to Sir Gernot for thirty years. Find him on the mountain in Act 1, polishing whatever holds still.
★★★★☆(the fifth star is in preparation)
“I intend to play it all the way to the end. I have a plan. Several, in fact. Forty-seven.”
Sir Gernot of ThereaboutsKnight. Has nearly slain the dragon many times. Camps below the cave in Act 1.
Approved(Form submitted on time)
“Received, read, stamped. I would have liked it in triplicate.”
Chairwoman Hilde PlumbSacrifice Committee, Town Hall, Lower Crumbling. Your paperwork starts at her desk.
★★★☆☆(one star deducted for the goose)
“Lovely game. There is a goose in it. I would like that on the record.”
Barnaby SumpLandlord of the Dripping Pan and Committee treasurer. Guards the ceremonial cake on the village green.
—(bit the reviewer)
“Hssssssss.”
The GooseVillage green, Lower Crumbling. Infamous. Do not turn your back on it.
★★★★★
“Fun for all ages. Is your copy insured against dragons? Two coppers. Turnip included.”
Nell Marrow, 9Sells dragon insurance and lucky turnips by the pond in the Prologue.
Taxable(pending audit)
“An important cultural work, and highly assessable. I examined it from a safe distance.”
Inspector Aldous LedgerwoodRoyal Dining Office. Somewhere near the cave entrance in Act 1, keeping his head down.
★★★★★
“I could not taste a single thing. For once, I did not mind.”
IngrimmScourge of the North. Wears a napkin. Waits in his dining hall at the top of the mountain.
The cast
A cook and his dragon
Pim Quendel
Dishwasher. Cook, technically.
Eleven years at the sink of the Dripping Pan, allowed only to watch. Knows Mistress Hulda Grubwald's Complete Kitchen by heart, with volume and page number. Can't improvise. Feels naked without a recipe. Is about to have an adventure made entirely of improvising.
“Grubwald says the best dishes are made with love. I assume the same goes for paperwork.”
Ingrimm
Scourge of the North. Wears a napkin.
The most feared dragon in the realm is really a melancholy gourmet. Three centuries of his own fire have left him unable to taste a thing. He talks in long, well-kept sentences and sighs smoke rings. All he wants is to taste something one more time.
“A pear. The finest pear of my life. I still think of her.”
Pictures
From the village to the mountain, and further
Village Square. The Sacrifice Committee keeps office hours.The Market. Everything is for sale, and most of it is edible.The Dripping Pan. Eleven years of Pim's life, mostly at the sink.The Backyard. Where the washing-up water goes, and the gossip with it.The Dining Office. Every meal in the kingdom passes through here. On paper.Dining Hall. A very large room with a very small table.Inn Kitchen. The chef talks only to his pots.Village Green. The cake is for after the ceremony.Cave Entrance. The view is lovely. The welcome is mixed.Dragon's Kitchen. Nobody has cooked here in a very long time.
“The Dragon's Cook” was only ever a working title. It said what the game is about, but it sounded like a picture book for bedtime, and it slipped out of your head the moment you closed the page.
So the game is now called Lower Crumbling, after the village where it all begins. The village sends someone up the mountain every spring and has stopped asking why. “The Dragon's Cook” stays on as the subtitle.
The chalkboard on the title screen got the new name painted on, with chipped letters like an old biscuit. The dragon in the chef's hat kept his spot.
The second playtest was kinder than the first, but it found the next weak spot. Too many problems were solved with one line of dialogue, and the hard ones mostly came down to handing someone a thing you could simply pick up somewhere. That is fetching, not thinking.
So every puzzle in the Prologue and Act 1 was checked against the old rules of the classic adventures, and most were rebuilt. Every puzzle now has to pass these:
Nothing opens with a single dialogue click, and nothing lying around is the answer as it is. Things you find are raw material: they need an idea, or need to become something else first.
The obvious attempt should fail, and the failure should tell you why.
What you need to know usually comes from someone else, somewhere else. Some conversations are small duels you can lose and try again.
Still fair: logical in hindsight, no dead ends, and the hint book will walk you there if you ask.
Act 1 grew along the way. The mountain has two new places and two new residents, both with a history that ties into the rest of the story.
A second rule came out of the same playtest: if something happens, you see it happen. No more Pim announcing “I open the gate” while nothing moves. Anything that can fall, swing, open, roll or disappear is now its own painted piece, set into the room, and it moves when you use it.
Around that:
A new interface. Menus, buttons, hint box and title now look like they hang on a kitchen wall, painted in the same style as the rooms, with a handwritten font. The inventory icons were all painted again to match.
Rooms with depth. Instead of a flat wall over an empty floor, the camera now stands inside the room and looks into a corner, with dark shapes in the foreground. The village market with the big tree is the reference every new painting has to match, so the style doesn't drift.
Crowds of people, not wallpaper. Background people are now separate little figures who idle, clap and cheer on their own.
No more floating heads. Some puppets had their heads hovering a little above their collars. A small checking tool now catches gaps and long necks before they reach the game.
And the next act exists, in rough form, playable from start to finish. Where it takes place stays a secret for now.
None of us can animate by hand, so the characters are cut-out puppets: painted parts, pinned together, moved by code. The first version of Pim was a stiff cardboard figure that slid across the floor. Today he got proper joints: thighs, shins, feet, upper arms, forearms and three different hands. His feet stay on the ground while he walks, he crouches to pick things up and reaches out when he uses something.
Two lessons from the day:
Cut-out arms look fine from the side and terrible from the front. From the front or back, a character now gets a whole painted body per pose. When we tried jointed arms on the Town Hall clerk, they looked like a string of meatballs.
For the big scenes, paint the whole group as one picture first, then cut the puppet parts from that. The departure from the village came together this way: a cart, a donkey with opinions, and a farewell crowd that is a little too cheerful.
The rooms also grew. Every background is now a full 1280 × 720 painting, with the inventory sliding up from the bottom edge only when you need it.
The first full playtest of the Prologue and Act 1 took about ten minutes. The verdict: lovely, but far too thin. Most puzzles were one step: give item to person, done.
So we tore it open. The new rules:
About two hours for the Prologue and Act 1 together on a first playthrough.
Puzzles chain. Most need several steps and several people, and the threads cross each other.
“Fair but chewy”: logical in hindsight, sometimes worth a think. The hint book got rewritten so its last hint for each task nearly tells you what to do.
Conversations work the old-fashioned way: options change as things happen, used-up topics disappear, and people notice what you've been up to.
The village grew from five rooms to seven, the mountain from a handful to eight. Every room got repainted denser and stranger, with lots of things to look at that have nothing to do with any puzzle and are there only for a joke.
Day one. The idea: a point-and-click adventure in the spirit of the old greats, with the tone of a comic fantasy novel, but entirely our own world. A dishwasher who has memorised fourteen volumes of cookery and never boiled an egg. A dragon who can't taste. A kingdom where cooking without a licence is a crime.
Some decisions we made early:
Godot 4, with a small engine of our own instead of a framework.
Modern controls: one click to act, one to look, no verb bar.
English first. A German version will come later, with the jokes rewritten, not translated.
The game never kills you and never locks you out. You can always pick something up if it's physically possible; if you can't, there's a visible reason in the world, and that reason is the puzzle.
By the evening there was a playable prototype with everything drawn in code. By the next day we had swapped it for painted art and never looked back.
