Nainai’s Recipe is a game that captures the essence, sounds, and tastes of home cooking through stylized naturalism. In the process of cooking, players unwrap a family story about how we lived and stayed connected in a special way during the pandemic, and a tribute to the simple caring power of learning our cultures through food.
Team:
Fan Fang, Mai Hou
My Contribution:
Designed player interaction to capture complex systems as a means of providing an engaging experience.
Art asset production, including environment design, 3D assets
Tech art: Toon Shaders, Materials
Organized monthly playtest event
Led the communication with executive producer
Impact:
1.7M views on related content(streamings, trailers, gameplay videos) across platforms.
138K Demo downloads
BAFTA Award, Best Student Game Shortlisted
Unity Awards, Best Student Project Nominee
Independent Games Festival(IGF), Best Student Game Nominee
A Maze International Games and PlayfulMedia festival, Digital Moment Award Nominee,
What’s this game about?
Movie Eat Drink Man Woman is one of the inspiration of the game
Cooking has so many parts that it can be thought of as a game. Time and resource management, experimenting, building skills, collaboration, etc. However, trying to incorporate all of these elements into a single game would most likely make it too complicated and overwhelming. There's a popular game for just about any topic: Cooking Mama, Over Cooked, and Cooking Simulator—the list goes on and on.
So why do we still want to make a cooking game? Food is at the core of my culture; every significant festival is centered around food. In Beijing, where I was born and raised, a common greeting line is not "How are you?” Instead, we say, “Have you had your meal yet?“ to show that we care for others. And we believe people can relate to this love language in one way or another.
Our approach is to combine fun interaction with a family story to offer players a wholesome experience. Using interaction design to translate a complex system into intuitive and enjoyable gameplay, alongside gaining skills, player will also get to know the protagonist family story with her grandma.
Design pillars
Step-by-step indulgence
Flexible control and no performance anxiety in our kitchen :) With no skill-oriented expectations or presets to our ingredient slice textures, we give players the ability to enjoy the tactile feeling of cooking a meal inside and out, from start to finish, at their own pace.
Quality ingredients of a larger food tradition
We curated a stylized kitchen with strong flavors from a Chinese kitchen, including appliances, condiments, and food choices.
Cross-generational bonding moments
During a challenging period in time, players will have more chances than ever to relax, joke, and talk to their grandma Nainai through texts and images, and get to know her story!
Interaction Design
We wanted to be able to mimic the versatility of the acts of cooking using mouse-only control, instead of binding multiple keys on the keyboard. Based on researching previous games of a similar market demographic as well as our own user research, we assessed that the fewer interface players need to tackle, the easier it will be for them to suspend their disbelief and transfer their experience of our digital space into the sense of a familiar kitchen.
Realword connection
Player experience varies a lot with different people, as does the significance of one cooking moment over another. We received a range of contradictory feedback, spent time changing it back and forth, and tested on both new and recurring players. We map the movement to real-life movement to make the interaction intuitive.
Tossing
Gliding
Interaction design minimalism
We are really ambitious about making a mouse only game. Based on researching previous games of a similar market demographic, we assessed that the fewer interface players need to tackle, the easier it will be for them to suspend their disbelief and transfer their experience of our digital space into the sense of a familiar kitchen.
Most interactable objects, like kitchenware or foods, have more than one action assigned to them to replicate real life. For example, a piece of food can be grabbed, examined and taste.
Pick up - Left click
Put down - Right click
Taste - Left click in examine mode
Examine - Hold
Consistency is the key
A good interaction system requires consistent rules, and we followed the rules throughout the design.
Left click is the frequent action (Pick up, eat, taste).
Left hold is less frequent action (examine of enter view).
Right click is to cancel action or exit.
This way, we made the interaction memorable and learnable.
3D Modeling
In most cooking games when there’s cutting mechanics, ingredient cross-sections are achieved by mapping pre-made textures. These pre-made textures are rarely of high quality or well-aligned, and they contrast with other parts of the visual experience. It was important for us to avoid this and instead, allow our players a perfect cross-section from any direction.
They should be able to feel that, though they are new to the possibility space of their kitchen, they have the safety of control and are able to slice at their own choice of angle and frequency. Therefore, we chose not to map textures but only use vertex colors for coloring. After cutting, we dynamically generate the vertex colors and object normals for the cross-section.
This design requires more work in the modeling stage, as I need to think about the inner structure of the model and understand how the mesh will be displayed after cutting and color generation by code. I designed and created all the models in Blender.
