Five days felt like a good first game. Then the question came back: what happens when someone finishes them all? This post is about the answer, and about a few things that make the kitchen feel more like a place.
Two more days
Day 6 is Rush Hour: customers arrive faster and the oven burns buns sooner. Day 7 is The Big Bun Party: two minutes, everyone in town, a little less patience. Neither needed new rules. A day is a small file of numbers (how long, who comes, how fast, how patient), so a new day is a new file and a few lines of art. The game rules did not change at all.
Two new customers
Mummy Pig arrives from day 6 and orders one or two buns. Rebecca Rabbit orders two and does not wait long. Each is drawn the same way as everyone else, from a script, with all six faces: plain, blinking, happy, sad and two walking poses. Both are original drawings in the show's flat style, not copies of anything from it.
Stickers
Three stars on a day earns that day's sticker. Stickers live in a sticker book you open from the day picker, with a question mark in each slot you have not earned yet. The book needs no storage of its own: the game already remembers your best stars, and a sticker is simply a day with three of them.
Bun Rush
Bun Rush opens after day 5. There is no timer. The game ends when three customers leave sad, and the longer you last, the faster people arrive and the less they wait. Your best score is saved on your own device, and nowhere else. It is the one place the game gets harder on purpose.
For grown-ups
A small settings page, reached from the title screen, has three switches: sound, customers who wait fifty percent longer, and bigger click areas so Peppa can reach things from further away. They are there for the children who need a gentler game, and they save on the device like everything else.
A kitchen that breathes
Everyone now blinks every few seconds and breathes a little. Customers hop when you serve them and look sad as their patience runs out, and Peppa wears a baker's hat and apron, because she runs a bun kitchen. None of it changes how the game plays. All of it makes the room feel less like a diagram.
What is next
The thing still missing is the thing that matters most: a real playtest with the children this was made for. The star targets on the new days were set by estimate and need a child's hands to tell us if they are right.