Carolina’s
Recipe Book
Type: Partnered
Role: Tech lead, Level Designer, Narrative Designer
Publisher: Personal project
game
A love letter to all ethnic eldest daughters, this 2D, top down cooking game aims to follow Carolina from when she first learns to cook to when shes mixing her cultural dishes with her wife.
The gameplay consists of both Cooking and Swiping Speech bubbles. The Player will feel progressively more Stressed as they prepare meals for their family.
OVERView
My Level Thumbnail Art
Brainstorming
This concept began as a simple idea that my friend, Blake Tran, and I thought up for an independent study.
We liked the idea so later that evening, we got all of our ideas out, good and bad. We went back later to add reference images and talked through the document comments
We picked up the idea again in May 2024 as a personal project. I combed through our old ideas in 2023 and picked out the most important and interesting points to include in the game.
After getting a feel for the atmosphere and pace, I was able to get a feel for our audience. From this I built our Pillars and engagement types to focus our design.
Next, we moved to the whiteboard with a more fleshed-out idea on paper to talk out some of the gaps.
Planning
With a good foundation in the form of an intelligible game design document, We got together to conceptualize using whiteboards. We focused on characterization and how the mechanics emphasized the narrative.
After brainstorming artistic representations of the speech bubbles with an emphasis on emotion and gameplay purpose, Blake and I talked about narrative-level progression. I took note of pacing in individual levels. Easier mechanics needed to be tutorialized early and narrative-focused levels emphasizing familial connection were slower dishes.
I thought of and wrote up a timeline for levels, emphasizing life-changing events in each character’s life and important locations to give context behind the speech bubbles.
This is where I thought up some essential mechanics and resources to begin programming, making note of important dishes that would tie together narrative and gameplay. The game started with simple, fun dishes and gained complexity as more members of the family added chaos to dinner time
After a large discussion, Blake and I settled on this level order. It starts focused on introducing the audience to the gameplay and culture, increases energy with more people and dishes, comes to a narrative peak, and resolves in a blended Puerto Rican-Vietnamese denouement.
proGRAMMING
This project helped me to develop my technical design skills. Though unfinished, it helped me to broaden my capabilities as a programer and better organize my Unity C# scripts.
Though I have done all the programming the project alone, I commented my code to allow others to better understand it when joining the project.
Making scaleable components that allowed you to create new, unique instances of objects with different sequences and timings. This makes development more intuitive, flexible, and accessible.
Scaleable Pot Component
Code Sample
Reflection
There is a lot of work to be done on this project. I’m planning to iterate on the placement of each object, the timing, and the speech of the characters. The gameplay is a bit fast as it is and the clutter, though adding to the narrative of the game, breaks the pace of gameplay. I will implement a scrolling countertop that will open more gamespace, but still illustrate the disorganized chaos that comes with a six person household.