Creating this game was quite straightforward: we had 1 month to make a game with an original twist.

The idea was to work as a small indie studio, therefore we had to create a pitch and sell it to our trainers (you can find it here).

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The time to pull out an idea was very short since every hour lost that way would have meant less time to develop: we needed something simple yet smart. I came up with the idea of a cooking game where the ingredients were alive and the team liked it. Great, but how to make this fun? Also, this was our first proper videogame ever developed, so we didn't want to make our lives a nightmare with something too complex. Given these restrictions, the other designer and I decided to base the gameplay on simple and repeatable puzzle elements. This would have allowed us to polish a few features and present multiple instances of them in the game, making it easier for the player to understand how to play and for us to develop.

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While working as a team we realized how important it was to share the knowledge of tools and methodologies across the departments: this way the communication got easy and the needs of every department became clear to everyone.

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On the technical side, we were able to identify and define a small bunch of features we wanted and managed not to change our minds during the development. This allowed us to have everyone on board and fully aware of the needs and goals of the project in each of its steps.

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We encountered 2 main challenges:

1. The programmers struggled to find a way to create the pathfinding on different levels for the creatures/ingredients, but thanks to the fact that the scope was limited and defined, they were able to spend more time on finding a proper solution to this issue.

2. On the UX design side, at first, we didn't know how to communicate to the player which elements in the level were interactable. Taking inspiration from other games, we figured out a couple of tricks that made this a cakewalk: we added a circle at the center of the view that enlarged when aiming at an interactable element and we surrounded those elements with an outline when aimed at.

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In the end, we delivered in time and the game was well appreciated.