Player journeys

Two seats, ninety seconds, no instructions.

The whole design target is stated as a single number: from cold link to first plate in the chute in under ninety seconds, with no account and no reading.

Journey A — The Diner (front of house)

#	Stage	What the player does	What the game must not do
1	Arrival	Opens a link. Sees a wet car park and a lit sign.	Ask for anything. No email, no age gate, no cookie theatre.
2	Identity	Types a callsign. Optionally takes a selfie, which is crushed to a 120×120 JPEG on device.	Upload anything before they consent, or require a camera at all.
3	Room	Lands in a local room if one is live, otherwise the always-open San Bernardino Oasis.	Ever show an empty lobby with nothing to do.
4	The board	Reads today's specials out loud, because they are ridiculous.	Explain the joke.
5	Assembly	Drags primitives onto a plate in 3D. Rotates, stacks, over-sauces.	Validate. There is no correct plate.
6	Cooking	Points a 1500W hotel hairdryer at it and watches it pass through Raw → Sizzling → Golden → Seared → Crispy Void → Burnt Singularity.	Hide the stage names, or make the states colour-only.
7	The send	Commits. Cannot take it back.	Offer an undo, a preview, or a confirmation dialog. The irreversibility is the comedy.
8	The wait	Watches the ticket move through the kitchen queue in real time.	Leave them staring at nothing. The wait must be legible and short.
9	Judgement	Receives it back, or watches it get incinerated, plus a deadpan review and a cosmic calorie count.	Be mean to the player. Be deadpan about the food.

Emotional shape: curiosity → confidence → over-commitment → dread → vindication or delighted humiliation.

Journey B — The Cook (back of house)

#	Stage	What the player does	What the game must not do
1	Arrival	Same link, picks Kitchen Mode.	Make the second role harder to reach than the first.
2	The station	The 3D kitchen bench, with the KDS as a phosphor HUD burned over the top of it.	Put the tickets on a separate screen. The cook never looks away from the food.
3	First ticket	A scrambled chime. A ticket lands with a countdown: green under 60s, amber under 120s, flashing red past 180s.	Punish slow reaction with failure states. Time pressure is texture, not a fail condition.
4	Reading it	Works out what a human being was attempting.	Tell them. Ever.
5	Claiming it	Clicks the ticket. It brightens, the HUD dims, and that order's plate is now the thing on the bench.	Make claiming free. See below.
6	Assembly	Cooks it on the same bench the diner used, with the same primitives and the same hairdryer.	Give the cook a different toolset. Symmetry of tools, asymmetry of information.
7	Deciding	`F1`–`F8` to bump, `Enter` to slide it back, `Del` to incinerate.	Require the mouse for any of it.
8	Consequence	Sees the diner's reaction land in the room.	Hide the outcome from the person who caused it.

The switching cost

The KDS is not a menu you visit — it is a translucent overlay on the live bench, always readable, never blocking. Which creates the one genuinely punishing mechanic in the game:

Claiming a different ticket while a plate is half-built throws that plate. Not a fade, not a confirmation. The rig drops physics on every placed ingredient and fires them off the bench — a spider in the fryer, a peg in the ceiling, sauce on the lens. It is over in about a second and a half, it makes a noise, and nothing is recoverable.

The reference is that specific kind of physics-sandbox slapstick where you microwave something you were told not to microwave and the room disagrees with you loudly. It teaches the rule in one demonstration, it is funny every single time, and it makes the cook's attention a real resource: you can watch every ticket, but you can only be building one.

Two mercies, because the game is not cruel:

A ticket you abandon returns to the queue with its timer intact — you lose your work, not somebody else's order.
An empty bench switches silently. The penalty only exists once you have committed something to the plate.

Emotional shape: boredom → alarm → judgement → power → the specific joy of throwing somebody's work in a bin.

What lives in the kitchen

The bench is not empty between orders. Small original fauna — the Ceiling Clinger, the Vent Tick, the Bin Barnacle — occupy the station, react to the hairdryer, occasionally get plated deliberately, and occasionally plate themselves. They are the game's only ambient life and its main source of unscripted incident.

They are written in the lineage of physics-sandbox pest comedy rather than borrowed from it: original designs, original names, no assets or characters taken from anyone else's game. The homage is to a tone — a hostile small animal in a workplace that has no procedure for it — and tone is not somebody's property.

Where the two journeys touch

Only in four places, deliberately:

The ticket — everything the diner meant, compressed into ingredients and a cook stage.
The queue — the diner can see their ticket is being handled, which makes waiting bearable.
The slide-back — the plate returning is the only positive channel in the game.
The bin — the only negative one.

There is no chat, no voice, no emote wheel. Two people communicating exclusively through food they cannot describe is the entire product, and every request to soften it is a request for a different, worse game.

Failure states, and their absence

The game cannot be lost. Nothing expires, no shift ends, no score gates content. The rush timer changes colour and the music gets tenser and that is the whole of the pressure. This is a comedy about work, and the one thing it will not reproduce is the part where work punishes you.