We’ve already given you a taste of the various donuts you could order from the Hotbox menu… and to celebrate National Donut Day, we figured it’s time to talk about how donut-making works. Not just how the customers react to the mood enhancers, but also the different patterns in how they ask for donuts!
The Branching Path of Donut Reactions
A new customer drops by the Hotbox and is unfamiliar with how mood enhancers work. MC will give them a crash course, but the best way to understand the donut is to eat the donut! And so begins our donut-making mini game. By deciding on what flavour of donut MC serves to their customer, the player will unlock different reactions (we recommend giving them a bad donut once in a while 😉) AND in some cases determine the ending they would get.
And when we say different reactions, we mean different! Sometimes the donut reactions follow a certain theme, and sometimes the characters just go off the rails and give us ten different life stories. Take for example Adam here, who goes all out. (Don’t worry, we made sure to add chapters on the video because he’s a little chatterbox!)
The Various Ways to Win a Customer’s Heart
You might have noticed that Adam asks for any type of donut, letting the player decide which flavour to go with, whether to serve one of the donuts on the menu or just follow their hearts. This is an example of a freestyle order. There are no right or wrong answers here (except maybe a burnt donut). Why don’t you try giving them different flavours to see what they’ll say?
Here’s a bit of a challenge! Detective Fox is a hardboiled detective who drops by San Mazo in search of the Donut Thief. He likes to add a bit of spice to his orders by turning them into riddles, giving the MC clues but not saying the recipe name outright. There are some characters who like to do this, so if you want a bit of a challenge, Detective Fox, Lucy and Zoey the Gamer Girl are some of the customers you should look out for!
But not to worry, you can always ask the customer to Clarify their order. No need to memorise the recipe list!
And sometimes, the customer doesn’t know what to do and lets MC decide. This choice has a pretty deep impact on Emmette’s arc… to go or not to go, that is the question. Should Emmette go see her favorite musical, or focus on the upcoming cheerleading nationals?
Now that we’ve got their orders sorted out… It's time for the actual donut itself.
The Parts of a Donut
Once you’re in the donut-making groove, you’ll notice that the orders will have a lot more variety. Customers aren’t always in the mood for donuts on the menu and would ask for specific flavours or toppings instead. They might even ask to replace or remove elements on an existing recipe (which we classify as modified recipe orders). On the screenshot above, Ainsley is asking for something pink, which is one of our ingredient ‘tags’.
This time Kolt gives us some wiggle room, asking for a taste profile that comprises both Matcha and Chocolate. Those are two different moods, so you can look forward to his different reactions!
By the way, the donut will take on all of the tags associated with each ingredient, so if Kolt asks for something Bitter and Green, only Matcha will qualify!
This doesn’t look right…
Hotbox customers also notice if MC has been skimping out on the ingredients! Here’s a regular Chocolate Factory:
And here are examples of the things that might ruin a customer’s day:
Drizzles are a bit complicated, especially donut recipes that ask for a specific design. Try to follow the stencil as much as possible.
A glaze that’s more than 50% would be a good donut, but if you want to hit ‘perfect’ points, you need to be more generous. No, don’t look at the money being taken from the Hotbox till! 😂
We call these the ‘technical checks’, the little donut details that affect your donut score (‘perfect’ donuts unlock unique dialogue and give higher tips!), and also elicit less than impressed comments from your customers.
Here’s a complete list of the tags we used for the technical checks! The game will prioritise the ones at the bottom, so if your donut has more than one problem, the customer would only mention the most important one. Here’s an example of Sally ordering a donut with multiple elements:
But don’t get overwhelmed with all the technical things! We tried to make customer reactions (even the technical checks) as fun as possible AND all of it is voiced… we’d love it if players tried to experience as much of these reactions as possible! 🤗 Meme the donuts, ragebait your customers! (Or not! Some of them might get really sad.)
You can experience some of the donut reactions in our demo!
Happy National Donut Day, gang! Have a virtual donut on us! 🍩🍩🍩