# Space Blends

## Summary {% tabs %} {% tab title="Responsibilities" %} ## **Game Design** * Defined core gameplay loop and asymmetric co-op mechanics * Helped design UI layouts and menu flow * Helped design the modular customer personality and dialogue system ## **Writing** * Wrote 400+ lines of customer dialogue across multiple personality types * Wrote copy for website and store pages * Localized game to French ## **Production & Implementation** * Coordinated with a remote team across time zones during development sprints * Implemented dialogue and and created customers using our own modular system * Designed and implemented majority of sound effects {% endtab %} {% tab title="Highlights" %} * Customer personality and dialogue system, with unique personalities and over 400 lines of unique dialogue * Designed for accessible local multiplayer, only 1 copy of game necessary to play * Distinct visual handdrawn identity, clear and charming UI/illustrations * Well-optimised, running fast on low-spec phones and only 17MB in size * Progressive difficulty levels with an endless game mode {% endtab %} {% tab title="Links & Media" %} * [Space Blends website](https://www.space-blends.com/) * [iOS store page](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/space-blends/id6749399295) * [Google Play store page](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.strangelyedible.spaceblendsgame\&pli=1) * [Original game jam page](https://luc-foster.itch.io/strangely-edible-midnight-snacks) {% endtab %} {% endtabs %} ## Introduction Space Blends is a local co-op game. One player shouts incomprehensible smoothie orders at another player who tries to relay information about unnamed alien ingredients to create drink orders. It's chaos, it's fun, and it can be downright hilarious. It was made by me (Luc Foster), Davide di Staso, Matilde Øland, Jack Conradsen, and composer Katie Ellwood. We made the first version in 36 hours at the Nordic Game Jam in April 2025. Players loved it more than we expected. That July, we met up in Sicily to turn our jam experiment into something polished and complete.

## The Concept Space Blends is an asymmetric co-op game. One player (the Smoothie Maker) takes orders and prepares drinks. The other (the Recipe Reader) has a secret recipe book full of weird ingredients with no labels, just pictures. As soon as you start the game, customers shout orders with deliberately difficult, sometimes nearly identical names. The Recipe Reader has to find the right recipe, then visually describe unnamed ingredients to the Smoothie Maker, who matches those descriptions to what's in their kitchen, and prepares the order before the customer loses patience. It's Overcooked meets Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. ## Switching to Mobile Soon after deciding to continue making this game, we realised that it was better suited for mobile. Short sessions, simple drag-and-drop controls, the ability to just pull out your phone and play; mobile removed friction and made the game more accessible. ## Gameplay Space Blends is built on asymmetric information. Both players need each other and neither can succeed alone.

### Player 1: The Smoothie Maker The Smoothie Maker faces customers who blurt out orders, like "SPLOINKUS" or "ÇAMØLTÉ". Silly or hard-to-pronounce names that sometimes sound similar enough to each other to cause even more confusion. This was a spur-of-the-moment decision that turned out to be a great idea. The struggle to pronounce and relay these names created interesting comedic moments and additional communication pressure. {% hint style="info" %} “What did you say? SEARK SuprEme or SENK SuprÈme?” {% endhint %} ### Player 2: The Recipe Reader The Recipe Reader has a secret recipe book, and cannot under any circumstances show it to their partner. Finding the right order is only half the battle: the recipes themselves contain no words, just pictures of bizarre alien ingredients. Now the Recipe Reader has to describe what they're seeing while the Smoothie Maker frantically scans their kitchen trying to match that description to one of dozens of weird ingredients. {% hint style="info" %} “What do you mean a ‘blue triangle’? There’s 3 of those!” {% endhint %} ### Unique Player Dialect One of the most interesting things we discovered happens after players start getting comfortable with the gameplay loop. As they get more familiar with the ingredients, they develop their own shorthand through various nicknames given to each item. Some of these names include "the ketchup nugget", "the smiley", and “the loopy snake”. This shared dialect only makes sense to them, and we noticed it in many playthroughs. Watching this happen was fascinating. Players were essentially chunking complex visual information into memorable handles and creating their own efficient communication system on the fly. What started as clumsy descriptions evolved into unique callouts that let them work faster. We created an environment where two people (friends or strangers) figured out how to coordinate under pressure without us telling them how. ## The Customer System To create greater variety and depth, we built a modular customer system that let us create distinct personalities with different patience levels, preferred orders, and dialogue. Customers can place two types of orders: specific recipes or ingredient requests. Ingredient requests add another layer of coordination since players have to work backwards from a description rather than a recipe name. Suddenly, it’s up to the Smoothie Maker to describe the ingredient. ### Personality Each customer has a personality trait that affects how they behave. A 'Lazy' customer speaks in a sleepy, relaxed way and doesn't mind waiting. An 'Impatient' customer has snappier dialogue and a much shorter patience timer. Each customer also has their own unique dialogue, sprites, and a favourite list of drinks they prefer to order. ### Dialogue Space Blends has a light and whimsical tone, but when it came to customer dialogue we also had to balance personality against clarity. Our first pass created problems: lines like "Took you long enough!" were meant to reflect an impatient character's personality regardless of timing, but players interpreted them as negative feedback for being too slow.

A snippet of our dialogue document. All lines are grouped by function.

We had to preserve personality while making sure players understood what the game was actually telling them. This took a lot of playtesting. What sounded innocent to me could land completely differently with certain players. Context matters a lot, especially when you're under pressure and time is running out.

Customer dialogue is flavouring around the only thing that actually matters: the order itself. Dialogue lines needed to add enjoyment and character without ever obscuring critical information. So I started writing with that hierarchy in mind: clarity first, personality second. If a line could be misread as game feedback, it got cut or rewritten. ## Art & Audio

Space Blends doesn't take itself seriously. We wanted to create something that felt immediately approachable and silly. Visually, that meant saturated colors, thick cartoony outlines, and a deliberate mix of the absurd and the abstract. Customers range from cat-human hybrids to lips with a pair of legs. The ingredients are all abstract shapes with odd patterns and contrasting colours. To keep things a little clearer, similar shapes share similar colours, making the confusing roster of food a little easier to navigate under pressure.

### Music Musically, our composer Katie landed on something between elevator music and a sci-fi cartoon soundtrack. It needed to convey the vibe of a silly service job without becoming grating after repeated plays. Something calm enough to stay in the background but weird enough to fit the setting. {% file src="/files/fWwnknCj50DnKhrCFd91" %} ## Accessibility Convincing a friend to download a game to play with you can be a bit of a chore. They need storage space, time to learn the rules, and often money. Even after all that, there’s a risk they might not like it, especially if it’s an unusual concept. This alone can put people off trying something new. Part of the challenge became reducing the friction that can come from picking up any game for the first time. The most obvious solution was making it free. After a brief stint as a paid app on the iOS App Store, we realized that as unknown developers releasing our first mobile game, asking people to pay upfront was killing potential adoption. Removing that financial risk made it much easier for people to give the game a chance. ### 1 Copy Only This was more important than pricing. Space Blends only requires one person to have the game downloaded. The Recipe Reader just needs the Recipe Book, which we made sharable through a QR code that links to a PDF. No download required. This also solved another, more social problem. When getting pitched a game by someone who’s already into it, it can feel a little alienating. Downloading another app is a commitment, especially if you don’t really know anything about what you’re about to download. And what about if they don’t want to download using their cellular data? Or what if the WiFi is bad? With the QR code, this friction is dramatically lowered. Only one person needs to commit to having the app downloaded, the other just scans with their camera.

### Tutorial People often do not want to spend much time looking at tutorials. Especially in a game like Space Blends, where players will inevitably be waiting for each other to learn the ropes or read instructions. Our tutorial walks both players through a single order in under a minute. Players are only taught what they need to know at the exact moment they need it, and are given clear, immediate feedback. After one order is complete, the training wheels come off, and the game smoothly transitions to an actual round. Players learn efficiently and get to the fun part fast, without sitting through more tutorial than absolutely necessary. We also added quick reference panels accessible from the main menu. Playtesting showed that new players pick up the rules fast when playing with someone experienced, so having an even faster refresher option worked better than forcing everyone through the same tutorial.

### Localisation Working with a multilingual team let us localise Space Blends into four languages. Between us, we covered English, Italian, Danish, and French. It took extra work, but it opened the game up to players who would've bounced off an English-only version.

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