Sushi Bar Samurai is a unique entry among the innovative games in the PAX 10. There is no platforming, no physics, and no combat. Instead there’s a chef (you), his trusty stock of sushi ingredients, and a pile of spirits who are owed a last meal.

Sushi isn’t made a la Cooking Mama. Instead, the eponymous bar of sushi ingredients scrolls across the top of the screen, and you simply click to queue your stock to make combinations that will result in palatable sushi. The game is perhaps a distant relative of Tetris, but because you can see the ingredients in advance, the emphasis shifts from tactical to strategic. In a nutshell, Sushi Bar Samurai is about mastering the arcane intricacies of sushi, and using them to plan an optimal path through a stream of ingredients.

We make a great deal of fuss about accessibility around here, and transparency is a part of that. You might predict that we’d be critical of a game that revolves around secret codes written in meat and rice, but read on to discover sole developer Casey Muratori’s intriguing counterpoints about transparency’s place in puzzle games. We also chat about the language of sushi and reasons to make a game aside from cash. There’s not presently a public demo, but stop by his website to read more about his development philosophy and check out some media.

Pixelsocks: So, Sushi Bar Samurai is a sort of pathfinding puzzle game. However, instead of finding your way through a space, you’re finding optimal combinations of sushi ingredients to navigate the upcoming stream of ingredients. Is that about right?

Casey: Yes. Of course, it depends on which of stage you’re playing. There are puzzle stages that are strictly optimization, and then there are speed stages, where it’s a mixture, because you don’t have to hit an exact target score. So you’re more just trying to get through at a good speed, and pick up combos as you see them.

Pixelsocks: Do the combos benefit you in the speed stages by keeping you farther from zero?

Casey: Exactly. One of the things that’s interesting about the game is that the puzzles themselves are small building blocks that build on each other, but they also start showing up in the speed rounds. So as your brain starts to learn to parse out more complicated sushi, you actually end up doing them at full speed in the puzzle rounds. I’ve played the game a ton, and I can actually read through a puzzle round at the same speed as a speed round.

It’s meant to be something very linguistic-brain central. You start to become fluent in just reading the lines. There’s never anything in the game that you don’t eventually get good enough at that you can go at speed through it, even though the first time it might have taken a while.

Pixelsocks: So, you’re basically teaching your players the language of sushi.

Casey: Absolutely. That was the goal.

Pixelsocks: So, the obvious question is, where did you come up with this idea?

Casey: That’s a very good question. I am a novice game designer. I knew a lot about game development but nothing about design. So, this game has been a very experimental process for me. As a result, I can not at all say that I had this idea and then I made it.

I wanted to make a game about sushi because I thought that sushi had a lot of simple ingredients that you could combine in lots of ways. I don’t want to fiddle over a stew for thirty minutes or anything like that. Sushi is fast assembly, and small sets of ingredients produce lots of combinations. That seemed to me like it would be a good place to go for game design.

Everything else about the game: the way the interface works, the way the combos work, the setting, everything, evolved over time as I found ways to solve problems of design or to improve things.

Pixelsocks: Did you have an idea who you wanted to play it once it started coming together?

Casey: Not really. This was my first game, so the most important thing for me was that I finish it, and it’s a good game. Those where my two goals.

For a long time, especially at the conference, people were asking me what the target audience was, what the distribution is. For me those where business questions, and I’m not so much interested in answering them. For me, if the game is good, and done, then I would be a happy camper.

I’ve never seen a decent game that couldn’t at least make some money and get distributed. So I couldn’t see any way to finish the game and be happy with it, and then not be able to find at least some way to distribute it. If that actually is the case, I probably just made a crappy game to begin with.

So it hasn’t been on the radar for me. Making a ton of money was not the goal, so I didn’t start out by saying, oh, there’s a certain underserved demographic with a lot of money, so let’s go ahead and make that.

Pixelsocks: At the PAX 10 panel you mentioned that you were making this game for yourself and you never really expected it to be played by other people. So, how did you find your way into the PAX 10?

Casey: Well, I wouldn’t say I didn’t expect it to be played by other people. I just meant I didn’t expect it to be a big deal. I didn’t think it was going to win anything.

The PAX 10 thing was a big surprise to me. [I did it as] a deadline thing. I found out about it, and thought, “I’d like to submit the game. It would be great to start getting in the habit of [making] the game publicly playable, instead of just for play testers I know in a private sort of situation.” I wasn’t really expecting it to win. The fact that it got selected was a shock, much like it’s a surprise how many people have enjoyed it here at the show and played it all the way through it.

Pixelsocks: I sat down and watched for quite a long while, actually, and just trying to figure it out was pretty compelling.

Casey: Yeah, I’ve noticed people just sitting and staring, but one of the things that I think is really cool is the game goes against a normal game design principle. One of the things that a lot of people say is if someone is watching another player, he should be able to figure out how the game is played from watching it. There’s never been any study done that shows that good games have this property. It is just people making an assumption.

It may be true, but you pointed out the linguistic thing, and that is very much the way that I think about it. I think if I made a game that has enough richness and complexity in it and you walk in on someone playing level fifty, you should have absolutely no idea what’s going on. If you do, the game was not giving the player enough interesting things to learn as they went through it. Now, I shouldn’t say that as a blanket statement, because different games try to do different things. However, in terms of a game like this–that’s puzzle-y and has interlocking elements where new things come out–I don’t think that should be true.

Much like if you listen to two fluent speakers speak a language, you shouldn’t understand what they’re saying after five minutes, right? They’re fluent, and you’re not. You need to start out small, and learn words, and other things to go on. And I feel that’s how this works, with a sort of richness of language.

Pixelsocks: Speaking of the language of sushi, if you were an expert sushi chef, would you be able to grasp it more readily?

Casey: Well, yes and no. For the sort of puzzle-y aspects of it, where the order bar at the top of the screen is the thing that you have to learn and read, I think it would not matter if you were familiar with sushi or not.

However, it’s kind of like vocabulary and grammar. The grammar might not be familiar to you, but the vocabulary could be. For example, if someone walks into this game and doesn’t know sushi, they may have no idea what the combinations might be until they go through the tutorials and learn them. However, all of the combinations are legal sushi that you could actually make. So if you were a sushi chef, or even someone who eats sushi, you’ll know that these things can be rolled into a rice ball, and you’ll be right. You wouldn’t have to go through as much of a learning process, as to what you can make, because you already know.

Pixelsocks: I wouldn’t actually be surprised if reading the entire line might be a little bit easier if you have a good background in sushi. Once you know what the symbols mean, you can think to yourself, “Okay, so I can collapse those two, and those three,” and suddenly, you have a lower memory load.

Casey: You’re not looking at letters anymore, you’re looking at words, and then you read the sentence. However, someone just stepping into it for the first time, and has no idea about sushi, will be at the letter level. And the game has to train you up to words first, before you can get to grammar.

Pixelsocks: One last question: If you had to pick one design element or design decision that really defines this as a game or makes it fun, what would it be?

Casey: In my mind, this game is about the parsing. It’s about looking at that bar, and working through a set of things that you know and figure out how you’re going to get a good match. To map it to a different game, it’s like playing Tetris: the part where you’re using your spatial reasoning to figure out where the blocks are going to go.

It’s not so much about how you get there. You don’t actually have to mechanically go through a lot of motions like to cut the fish, roll the rice. Earlier versions of this game had those, and I removed them.

So I would say it’s [the focus on parsing], because that’s what makes the game more about deciding what you’re going to make and less about making it, which is traditionally what games about cooking have been. Doing something when I’m given a recipe and my mind is never gong to work for me, I never really enjoy that. So parsing adds a new element for that that makes it fun.

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