Good Pizza, Great Pizza is a mobile story-driven cooking simulator, with thousands of players and Editor’s Choice on the Apple App Store.

While serving customers and making pizza, players can work their way up from rookie to Master Ovenist. Along the way, they’re antagonized by several rivals and have to overcome adversity, with pizza as their main problem-solving tool. A core mechanic of the game is that customers often order in riddles; part of the gameplay is to decipher what the customer is even asking for in the first place.

My Role

Role Title: Narrative Design Intern

Tools used: Microsoft Excel, SourceTree, Jira

  • Designed narrative and quests for seasonal events that release every two weeks that resonated with players and incentivized them to keep playing the game.

  • Wrote gameplay and narrative orders, UI text, and character dialogue for events and general gameplay.

  • Created story outlines and characters for events and chapter drafts that utilized existing lore and characters while expanding the Good Pizza, Great Pizza world.

I contributed to the narrative design on the Bonfyre Fest 2026, Pet Spectacular 2026, and Oven and Orcs events.

Events

Oven and Orcs

For this event, I:

  • Designed and edited 3 campaigns and 30+ quests, balancing side quests and main quests while ensuring quests flowed well together to form a cohesive story.

  • Created quest encounters, working with the lead game designer and engineers to ensure the narrative enhanced the event’s RPG mechanics.

  • Wrote character dialogue and adventure logs for 9 characters, maintaining preexisting characters’ voices and catering to players’ tastes.

Oven and Orcs is a completely new event introduced August of 2026 inspired by the tabletop roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons. The player acts as a cast of regulars’ guild master, sending them out on quests and guiding them through as they clear encounters by passing skill checks.

Documentation Restricted by NDA

Campaigns and Quests

The event has three main campaigns: Rescue the Princess, Treasure Hunt: The Talking Box, and Slay the Dragon. Due to time-constraints, the campaigns do not have branching between quests, but the latter two campaigns have light branching in specific quests.

Quest Descriptions:

Each quest has a favored stat (STR, INT, or DEX), and they are subtly hinted to the player through the quest descriptions. For example,

  • “Listen in and think fast,” to hint that the favored stat is INT.

  • “Prepare for battle” to hint that the favored stat is STR.

  • “Steady hands” to hint that the favored stat is DEX.

These hints are intentionally kept vague to mirror the way a real-life game master wouldn’t explicitly tell their players how to win.

Encounters & Choices:

Quests are made up of 1-3 encounters, where players must pass a skill check. Critical failure causes players to fail quests entirely, while regular failures deduct rewards and allow the player to complete a quest if they haven’t failed the majority of encounters in a quest.

Encounters always have 3 choices, and they can be made up of STR, INT, DEX, or LUK skill checks. STR, INT, and DEX checks use the party members’ collective stats to determine their success rates, and LUK is a full 50/50 chance for players to succeed or fail critically. Critical failure resulted in failing the quest entirely.

Encounter/Quest Results:

Because of time and budget constraints, encounters couldn’t have result lines based on skill check performance. In order to make these flow and sound cohesive, encounters didn’t have result linest. This meant than in multi-encounter quests, the introduction line of an encounter had to build off of the previous encounter in a way that was applicable to both success and failure in the skill checks.

After the last encounter in a quest, the player can read a quest result line, based on their performance in each skill check of the quest. Regardless, the player would complete the quest as long as they didn’t roll a critical failure.

Additionally, side quests were made up of randomized encounters, since players replay them a lot in order to get EXP. Those encounters still had to make sense narratively together. At least one encounter in each multi-encounter quest was always presented to the player, so quests could maintain their narrative structure while being variable enough for a player to not replay the same exact quest multiple times.

Character Dialogue and Adventure Logs

There are 8 unlockable party members in the Oven and Orcs event: a bard, a fighter, a paladin, a rogue, a cleric, a monk, and a wizard. Certain party members were existing NPCs reframed as their classes (ex. Nic the musician as a bard and Miguel the doctor as a cleric), and the remaining party members were completely new NPCs created for the event.

Character Dialogue:

Brynn the Paladin was a new character designed for the event. Typically, characterizations are made before art, but in this case, her character lines were written based on her design and her class. Her order line also had to subtly hint towards her favored toppings, which if placed on the pizza, would give her a stat boost: mushrooms, sliced tomatoes, and pepperoni. Because of these factors, her lines lean towards balance, fate, and justice. The player can infer that she took an oath of justice.

Miguel the doctor is a preexisting fan-favorite character featured in other events. Lines had to remain consistent with his character, read as if he’s familiar with the player, and hint towards his favored toppings. Miguel’s favored toppings are sliced tomatoes, basil, and artichokes, so his line refers to nutritious toppings as a way to imply those are his favored toppings, as well as to keep it consistent with his character as a doctor. The player community has also made posts about finding him attractive and wanting a game where they can date him, so he has lines where he flirts with the player very subtly and makes them feel special.

Adventure Logs:

Adventure logs are buffer lines before and between encounters that provide characterization for characters and to break up encounters that didn’t flow directly into one another. Each party member has three lines that are picked randomly at run-time. The amount of adventure log lines that pop up between quests are dependent on party size, to ensure that players don’t experience repeat lines while playing through a quest.

Each adventure log line is meant to reflect the party member and/or their dynamic with the party. Initially these were also going to include banter between party members, but were cut to reduce scope and budget.

Bonfyre Fest 2026

For this event, I:

  • Wrote and edited orders and story dialogue based on the existing premise and previous events.

  • Created new regular and challenge event orders, balancing the order’s riddle and comprehension difficulty with the in-game gameplay challenges.

  • Worked with translators to ensure each line was properly understood and translated into each language with proper context and meaning.

Bonfyre Fest is Good Pizza, Great Pizza’s annual summer event. It takes place on a beach called “The Wedge” and the player is invited by a surfer named Steve who gives them avocados, the event topping, and asks them to cater the event. The player meets the city’s mayor, Mayor Che, who is overly committed to ensuring nothing goes wrong during the festival at the expense of his own well-being, and his wife, Victoria, who wants to prove to him that city can handle problems without him for a change.

An order hinting to players that the customer wants a Paradise Pie with jalapeños and avocados.

An order referencing a plot point in the event where a “shark sighting” was staged in a public park.

Pet Spectacular 2026

The Pet Spectacular is a light annual event that supplements regular gameplay with a focus on regular customers and their pets. Various regular customers come in to show the player their pets and have unique orders. There are no new gameplay mechanics, and the event content in gameplay is mainly the new flavor orders.

For this event, I:

  • Created a new pet + regular combo: Nia and Chili the chameleon and incorporated lite branching into orders based on if the player had played the event in previous years.

  • Designed and wrote new flavored pet or animal-related customer orders to keep players engaged.

  • Wrote “Pizza News Network” segments that expanded the Good Pizza, Great Pizza world and provided a loose plot for players to follow throughout the event.

An order from Nia and Chili giving some insight into their dynamic while also tying into gameplay with a pizza order.

An order from a regular referencing a news segment that encouraged viewers to stop by the shelter to adopt a pet.

An order from a regular referencing TapBlaze’s other game, Good Coffee Great Coffee.