The Kitchen Kauldron
With some compulsion from a strange witch, three players hop in to a cooperative game that saw each participant hop into an actual dilapidated trailer and engage in different roles for a unified goal - to satisfy as many orders as possible to save the failing food truck!
Left to Right: Jenelle Yuan, Stella Golden, Sammy Gerolaga, Nicholas Huang, Avery Taylor, Justin Finuliar, and yours truly.
In its initial wheeled form in 2021, the Kitchen Kauldron has made appearances at 2-Bit Circus and around our ArtCenter College of Design campus. It had also received nominations during Indicade 2022. To bring it to San Francisco and exhibit it at the 2023 Game Developer’s Conference alt.ctrl.GDC segment, we gutted out and redressed the bones - there we nabbed the Audience Choice Award to take home that year!
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KK was originally designed for the confines of the trailer. Towing the project in its state was not entirely feasible, however, and so the solution was to refashion the experience into a set of arcade cabinets that we could move and install in a modular fashion. Above are photos of the game in its complete state, in the trailer at 2-Bit Circus and at GDC 2023.
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By playing the "teacher card," Justin was able to secure this tiny house on wheels for us to work our magic. The big catch was that it sat largely abandoned on a farm far up the Grapevine 5 Freeway. The first two of our working weeks on KK involved lots of hazardous cleaning, just to barely start getting comfortable with working in its interior. But what a great makeover it was!
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I mentioned that the trailer had to go through some hazardous cleaning. We found dead swarms of black widows (not alarming at all) littering the outside of the truck afterward. Someone had the bright idea of casting them in resin to make game dice. Appropriate. Jenelle seemed to have the most fun working with
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GameDeveloper.com - “Inside the full size food truck controller of Kitchen Kauldron”
Pasadena Now - “ArtCenter College of Design Students’ Video Game Steals the Show at Major International Game Developers Conference”
ArtCenter College of Design - Students’ Immersive Video Game Takes Center Stage at Prestigious International Game Developers Conference”
Game Developers Conference Archive
*not yet updated to feature exhibitions following 2020.
