One of the stretch goals I have for this game jam is to have the people in the game world be represented across a wider culture group. This is not an easy feat.

However, I think if one is going to build a Ramen empire it’s important to know that empire is going to span people from all different cultures. An idea I have (which won’t make it into the jam) is to let you grow your empire country by country.

There’s something called Ramspace which is when Ramen went to outerspace*. It’d be great if this little project were one day successful enough to justify building an intergalacity space ramen empire. I’d likely base some of the mechanic on an old board game called Solarquest, which goes back some years.

*- I’ll search for information about “Ramspace” related to ramen in outer space and write you a paragraph on this topic.

The Celestial Noodle Odyssey

In the shadowy recesses of culinary innovation, where gastronomic ambition meets the cold vacuum of space, there exists a curious phenomenon known as “Space Ram”—a ghostly transformation of humble ramen engineered specifically for the weightless ballet of orbital consumption. Born from the twilight imagination of Momofuku Ando, the patriarch of instant noodles, who at the venerable age of 94 created this cosmic iteration in 2005 for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

Unlike its terrestrial cousin—that staple of impoverished students and midnight sustenance—Space Ram required arcane modifications to survive the peculiar physics of microgravity. The broth, thickened to prevent the horror of renegade droplets drifting toward delicate instrumentation, and the noodles, shaped into mysterious spherical formations rather than their traditional serpentine configuration, allow consumption with that most pedestrian of utensils—the fork. The space-faring variants eventually expanded beyond the original chicken flavor to include more exotic incarnations: curry, shrimp, and soy sauce, each carefully formulated to combat the existential melancholy of dining among the stars.

This ethereal preparation requires no volcanic temperatures; instead, it awakens with water heated to a mere 70 degrees Celsius (158 Fahrenheit)—a practical concession to the limited thermal resources aboard mankind’s orbital outposts. When Noguchi later ascended to the International Space Station, these noodles accompanied him like culinary familiars, providing a whispered reminder of earthly comfort amidst the silent void—a triumph of human ingenuity and a testament to that most fundamental truth: that regardless of how far we venture into the cosmos, our stomachs inescapably follow.