Hello fellow Chefs and Foodies! Today we will provide some details about one feature we are quite proud of, the Recipe Editor.
Creating the Recipe Editor has been a monumental challenge. We wanted it to be realistic and still fun at the same time, not a simple task considering how complex cooking is. We therefore had to find the best compromise.
Despite the difficulty, we didn’t quit. There are more than two hundred pre-made recipes in the game and many more will be added in the future. More importantly, we wanted our players to be able to re-create their own favorite dishes, or experiment with ingredients and taste, and create new delights.
The Recipe Editor itself is not that different compared to crafting features popular in many game genres. There are some ingredients at the player’s disposal that must be assembled together into something with good stats. New or better ingredients can be unlocked during the game, and it will be very important to have the best ingredients at available, to offer to your target audience the best recipes possible.
Available ingredients can be dragged into three possible slots, used to define Main Ingredients, Important Ingredients, and Secondary Ingredients.
Main Ingredients will be the foundation of the recipe, and they will drastically affect a recipe Taste, they will also come in a higher quantity. And yes, this will affect the final price.
Important Ingredients are the ones used to give a recipe its identity, their quantity won’t be as high as the Main Ingredients, but you will still want to be careful with them. Main and Important ingredients can be used to unlock proper Tags for a Recipe.
Secondary Ingredients are meant to be used to do small tweaks to a recipe, but they won’t add any Tag to the Recipe. Having three clams in your pasta is not going to turn it into a Seafood based Recipe!
How do Tags work? Let’s say you put some Meat in your recipe, it will gain a “Meat” Tag. The game will interpret the Tags of all Recipes you will put in your menu, and this will affect possible customers. Specializing in Seafood may lure many high-paying people interested in refined cooking, but it will drive all Vegans and Vegetarians away.
But a recipe, before being targeted for a certain customer group, must be tasty, doesn’t it? Every recipe is characterized by a single Quality Score, which is generated taking several elements into consideration. The final Taste must be balanced, the Aroma of various ingredients must be compatible, and your Avatar’s skills should fit the recipe you are creating.
We tried to make sure that a good dish in game is also good in real life, but sometimes we had to make some exceptions to the rule.
Our model is 100% sure that Carbonara Pasta tastes better with some onions chopped finely in the sauce. The concept itself can spontaneously set on fire a thousand Roman innkeepers on the spot. We thought about hardcoding Carbonara Pasta for sanity’s sake, but opening a conversation about culture vs innovation can also be interesting, right? Let us know what you think about the Recipe Editor, we’re eager to hear your thoughts!