Unfinished Video Script: After the Dust; Bakers Valley
What if we replaced the pizzas in Work at a Pizza Place with cakes?
Note: This is an old video script dating back to 2018, edited to conform with my current standards as best as possible and now includes pretty images! I hope you like this blast from the past.
This game once was the icing on the front page when it first launched on the 1st of August 2017. However, gravity has played it’s part and the game has not seen a glimpse of the glamour since. I’m EcoScratcher, and we’re analysing RoyStanford’s Bakers Valley in After the Dust.
[cue intro]
Bakers Valley could be described as a weird mash between Work at a Pizza Place and Bake a Cake, whether it’s the Back for Seconds version or not. In this game, you bake cakes (of which you can have various flavour and sizes), put decorations on said cakes and box these cakes up to ship to customers. Pretty simple, right?
Like Work at a Pizza Place, you can also take orders and see the customer’s reactions when they pick up their cakes. Another feature that was borrowed is being a cashier and pick up people’s orders. However, being a cashier does not earn you any money. That gets me. What also really gets me annoyed is having to wash out your dirty tins in a place nobody sees. Seriously, are you going to be able to distinguish that receptacle with the wall?
Like basically all the other games in existence, you can also rent a plot of land for a house in a shack which literally all the newbies drive by because it’s literally mistaken as a small cube pretending to be a house that nobody wants to see. There are also many other quirks and features such as the ‘Low Graphics Mode’ for all those people who cannot handle such simple bricks. Speaking of bricks, the building style is similar to RoyStanford’s other games, such as Redwood Prison, which inspired Badcc1 to create Jailbreak and The Living Dead, a roleplay-shooter game based on The Walking Dead
But how do simple bricks get you popular? The answer to that is people power. RoyStanford had a dedicated player base from Redwood and Living Dead. In fact, he has 909 Twitter followers and 24 thousand plus Roblox followers.2 But if RoyStanford has a dedicated player base, why would the game drop from tens of thousands to just hundreds? It simply lies with the game itself — it is simply too repetitive. There’s a reason why Work at a Pizza Place isn’t number 1 anymore: whilst yes, there is the allure of social interaction, the primary task of the game is still the same-old “work at a store” trope that has been seen countless of times on the platform. Dued1 however did a slightly better job with replay-ability as certain roles such as suppliers and the manager (which boosts playtime given it’s exclusivity) are present, where there is no such counterpart in Bakers Valley. However, RoyStanford did intend to add more roles, as evident through the empty rooms in the back of the bakery. Another key point is that there are few things that you can upgrade. Sure, you can customise your house but can you customise the cars and most other things? No. There’s a lot that the developer could have done to improve the success of his game
But what if the game succeeded? It would stay longer on the front of the front page of course. Asimo3089 and Badcc would be furiously working on their next update, anxiously hoping that they could claw back the top spot. However, there is one thing that will change the Roblox history books forever. Work at a Pizza Place will be dethroned from being on the front page as people rush and claim Bakers Valley as their own. Dued1 would also be one of the victims as the popularity of his game sinks. However, Work at a Pizza Place will still be in a limbo position, like Prison Life is right now after Jailbreak. People have put in too much effort in Pizza Place that it cannot be eradicated entirely. But Bake a Cake could be hit the hardest if Bakers Valley continued to add toppings and various other customisation abilities, as they ditch older games for newer, shinier ones. This effect would be tremendous if Bakers Valley had succeeded. Roy’s other games may receive a boost in players, although not enough to challenge the other top guns. If anybody could challenge the top guns, it would be Roy that could. And could he once did but unfortunately not anymore.
Hello everyone! I’m EcoScratcher. Thanks for watching this video! Or maybe listening, I guess. Remember to like, subscribe, have a discussion in the comments and share. That’s enough for me, so I guess I shall burn into the stratosphere. alright bye.
That wraps up the first review on Explorers of the Metaverse. From now on, reviews won’t be recounts written four or so years into the past, but will be written in the current time, with my own personal thoughts and views, some of which have shifted drastically but others have stayed the same.
Bakers Valley is a Roblox experience. You may visit it here. Due to the historical popularity of the game, it is not listed on Explorer.
Whilst asimo3089 was also a creator of Jailbreak, the Roblox blog post at the time had badcc cite Redwood Prison as a source of inspiration. Asimo3089 clarified in a tweet a few years later stating that Jailbreak was ultimately based on a “few different prison games”
asimo3089 on Twitter: "@liamgames987 Based on a few different prison games. None of them at the time had stuff outside of the prison. If you escaped, the game was over. We made Jailbreak so we’d have something to do when breaking out. Those old prison games were fun" / Twitter
RoyStanford now currently has 1,920 Twitter followers. Roblox followers are generally considered to be irrelevant, especially with the number of spambots more recently, hence a number will not be provided.