McGribble’s

Two players share a kitchen and nothing else. The Diner gets an absurd order from a procedurally generated specials board, assembles it in 3D out of objects that are not food — Cobalt Spiders, Hardwood Pegs, Speed Stick Secret Sauce — cooks it with a 1500W hotel hairdryer, and sends it through a chute. The Cook works a 1990s bump-bar KDS that is overlaid directly onto their live 3D bench, claims tickets, rebuilds what a stranger was attempting, and either slides it back or incinerates it.

There is no chat, no voice and no emote wheel. The comedy is generated entirely by the gap between what one person meant and what the other person received, and every mechanic exists to widen that gap.

A playable multiplayer prototype is already public, already free to run, and linked from this page. This application is not asking anyone to imagine the game.

We are requesting $30,000 over six months for the completion and release of the micro-scale game: the kitchen HUD refactor, the art and audio passes, an external accessibility audit, a structured playtest programme, and release on web, itch.io, Android and iOS.

Every kitchen game we admire is about logistics. In Overcooked and its descendants the kitchen is the obstacle and the order is a token; everyone at the table is on the same side, fighting a floor plan. Gribble’s moves the obstacle. The kitchen is fine. The other player is the obstacle — not through malice, but through the ordinary impossibility of explaining what you meant to somebody with a timer running.

Three things here are genuinely unusual

Symmetric tools, asymmetric knowledge. Both players get the same bench, the same twelve primitives, the same hairdryer. Only the information differs. Most asymmetric games split the verbs; we split the understanding, which is what actually happens at work.

The order list sits on top of the kitchen, not on a separate screen. Tickets float over the cook’s bench, so they never look away from the food. That makes attention the thing you run out of: you can read every order, but you can only build one. Start a new one while a plate is half-finished and the physics flings the old plate across the kitchen — about a second and a half of slapstick that teaches the rule instantly and stays funny.

Comedy generated on device, for free. A single date-seeded pseudorandom stream pairs place names against adjectives against food categories that should not touch, producing Pleasure Wharf Family-Size Dessert Chowder and six hundred more. Everybody in every room shares today’s board. No model is called; the running cost of the joke is zero. It is also the funniest thing in the build, because a machine that cannot tell dessert from chowder is doing an unimprovable impression of every franchise menu ever written.

Tone, and why deadpan is the right instrument

The reference points — Apple Cabin Foods, Dr. Steve Brule, the flat fluorescent melancholy of a franchise operating at 2am — all run the same trick: the surreal thing is delivered by someone who finds it completely unremarkable. An alien in the queue gets the same lighting as the bin.

That is a creative choice first and a production advantage second. Deadpan is written, not animated. A menu item on a lit board with a price beside it is funnier than any cutscene a micro-budget could buy, and it costs one line in a word list. The voice is dry, unimpressed, anti-heroic and suspicious of management — recognisably Australian without a single kangaroo in it, and it travels because a spider on a plate is funny in every language.

The comedy’s target is always the franchise, never the worker. This is made by people who have worked those jobs.

Full reasoning in 01-core-insight and 07-art-direction.

What already exists

All of this is in the public playable build and none of it is being funded twice: cross-device multiplayer sync; 3D plate assembly with twelve primitives; the hairdryer heat model and six cook stages; the CRT KDS with rush timers and bump-bar keys; the date-seeded generator for specials, reviews and scoring; Web Audio synthesis of the station’s music and eight effects; zero-auth onboarding with client-side avatar compression; kiosk mode; PWA install; and working Capacitor Android and iOS builds.

Six months, six milestones

Structured playtests close months 2, 4 and 5 — twelve sessions, deliberately including a slow Android device and a locked-down machine.

Budget

Total project cost is $50,250. The balance is the applicant’s already-delivered prototype work (45 days, in kind, $20,250). Hosting and infrastructure are $0, in perpetuity, by design. Rates are quoted excluding GST and are set at or above standard Australian day rates for each discipline; nobody on this project works for a credit.

Why the running cost is zero, and why that matters

Micro-scale games usually die of operating costs long before they die of disinterest. This one syncs only string IDs and coordinate pairs through Firebase’s free tier, serves static files, generates its content and its audio on device, and compresses avatars to under five kilobytes before they leave the phone. There is no runtime AI, no media pipeline and no server to keep warm. It is a multiplayer game that cannot go bankrupt by becoming popular.

On the applicant’s practice

This is the first shipped release of original IP by a two-person studio, and the first thing we can hand to a festival, a publisher or a hiring studio as a working link rather than a pitch deck. It takes us from people who build things for other people to people with a finished, public, playable game and a documented process for having made it.

The specific craft we are buying with this grant is the part emerging developers most reliably never get to: the last twenty percent. Feel, audio, accessibility, and the discipline to declare a small game finished instead of quietly expanding it until it collapses.

On the Australian games landscape

The transferable output is not the game, it is the pattern. The received wisdom is that multiplayer means servers and servers mean money, which is why almost no Australian micro-studio ships a live multiplayer game. We will publish the whole thing at release: the zero-account, zero-cost sync layer, the free-tier budget maths, the on-device procedural comedy generator, and an honest account of what the free tier will and will not carry.

A live, multiplayer, zero-account, $0/month web game with published architecture is a public good disproportionate to a $30,000 grant. It lowers the floor for every micro-game after it.

It also makes an argument about scale that the sector needs: that a finite, fifteen-minute, free game with no roadmap is a legitimate creative object and not a failed larger project.

A two-player game asks a favour of somebody who did not choose it. Every step between the link and the kitchen is a place that person leaves. So there is no login, no email, no password, no age gate, no launcher, no download and no install — a callsign, and you are in. The selfie is optional, compressed to 120×120 on device, and never required.

That is a privacy position as much as an access one: the game cannot leak what it never collects. For something that will be played by teenagers on shared machines, that is the responsible architecture rather than a shortcut.

Hardware inclusion

Static files, primitive geometry and synthesised audio, targeting a five-year-old Android on a slow connection, a school or library machine with no install rights, an old iPad, and a laptop with integrated graphics. Every one of those is a real player normally excluded by a four-gigabyte download and a launcher update.

Accessibility commitments, testable

An external accessibility audit is a funded line item in month 5, not an intention. Content-wise, the register is deliberately non-verbal and non-cultural, and jokes whose target is a person’s body, accent, disability or poverty are off the table. Full detail in 04-access-and-inclusion.

The prototype question, answered directly

A playable build exists and is public. The fund funds both prototype creation and the completion and release of a micro-scale game; we are applying against the second. The existing build is the evidence, not the deliverable. It is why this budget has no discovery phase in it, and why the schedule can commit to a release date in month six.

Original creative work throughout. The kitchen’s fauna — the Ceiling Clinger, the Vent Tick, the Bin Barnacle — are original designs written in the lineage of physics-sandbox pest comedy; the homage is to a tone, and no character, asset, name or likeness is taken from any other game.

And the honest weaknesses

No prior commercial release — which is what this fund is for, and the public prototype speaks before the CV does. Comedy is unfalsifiable on paper — so this application ships with a live build and today’s real generated menu rather than a description of one. No revenue model — correct, and deliberate: this is a micro-scale practice and portfolio project, which is precisely the instrument the Emerging Gamemakers Fund is.

• The live playable prototype — two-player, in a browser, no account
• Creative pitch deck, on the Screen Australia template
• Project plan and budget, on the Screen Australia template
• Eight working documents — insight, audience, journeys, access, positioning, assessment, art direction, production
• World and character art — the franchise’s history, illustrated