Soup Kitchen
Skills Developed
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Unity C#
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Mechanic design
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Systems design
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Video production
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Project Management
Main Roles
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Designer
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Programmer
Overview
Soup Kitchen is a fast paced kitchen game inspired by games in its genre. The focus of this project was on its economic design, and how it interacted with the various systems within the game. The player's objective is to multitask creating a variety of soups whilst also preparing ingredients and discarding waste. Between phases in the kitchen, the player is able to purchase more ingredients and permanent upgrades for their kitchen to use later.
Mechanic Design
The player is able to earn money through selling soups in the kitchen. If they submit a high-priority order, or submit the meal of the day, the player will earn an additional sum of money on top of the original value of the soup. The player can lose money by not completing orders in time. They also lose more money for failing a high-priority order, with some variation.
Systems Design
When the player is about to start in the kitchen, they get to choose what stock they want to use for that day (up to a limit of 3 to start with). A function then runs that loops through every soup recipe and only returns recipes that contain all of the chosen ingredients for that day. This lets the player alter the difficulty off the game on a regular basis and allows them to set their own challenges.
Playtesting
Every fortnight I ran playtests with other students to gather feedback to improve our projects. Early on, I ran more black box playtests, giving me useful feedback targeted at players who hadn’t seen the game before and improving the onboarding experience. As the project developed, I started performing more white box playtests to dial in specific mechanics like the order system and market.
​Project Management
Over the course of the project I used Trello to track my progress and set goals for upcoming playtests. This gave me a schedule to stick to and meant I could focus my efforts towards a minimum viable product.
