Hi everyone! We’re the team at TATOMAMO, a small studio making story-driven and family-friendly mobile games. When we started developing Food Festival 3, we wanted to combine the feeling of watching a cartoon with the interactivity of a cooking simulator. We called this vision a playable cartoon.
It sounded simple at first: just make a game feel like a cartoon. But the deeper we got, the more we realized how many design and technical details stood behind that phrase. Here’s what we learned along the way.
1. Consistency Is Everything
One of the first challenges was making the experience seamless. Cartoons usually flow smoothly, with consistent timing and visual transitions. Traditional games often interrupt the flow with hard cuts, loading screens, or pop-ups. We had to rethink how to move between scenes and steps in a cooking simulator while keeping a cartoon-like rhythm.
For example, instead of abrupt transitions between kitchen stations, we used short in-between animations. These “micro-cuts” help the player stay immersed, almost like scene changes in an animated show.
2. Expressive Characters Drive Engagement
In a cartoon, characters tell the story through facial expressions, sound, and movement. We applied the same idea in our cooking game: giving characters reactions, little idle animations, and tiny personality touches that made them feel alive.
Even silly things, like a burger patty jumping a bit if you over-flip it, help the player feel connected. We saw that this emotional connection increased replayability and made the gameplay more memorable.
3. Slow Play Beats Adrenaline
Most cooking games focus on speed — racing against timers, dealing with failure, or managing queues of orders. We took the opposite approach. A cartoon is rarely stressful; it’s more about a fun, relaxed pace.
By removing timers and “fail” states, we let players focus on the creative act of cooking. They could experiment, discover surprises, and repeat steps if they wanted. The game became more meditative — something you might play in the same cozy mood as watching a cartoon on a Sunday.
4. Animation Pipelines Matter
A playable cartoon only works if the animation is solid. We invested a lot of time designing a workflow where our artists could quickly tweak character poses and transitions without waiting for full builds. That meant prototyping in layers, testing rigs early, and automating repeat elements where possible.
For a small team, this saved us huge amounts of time and let us keep the quality consistent.
5. Keep It Honest
Finally, we learned that being honest about our limitations helped a lot. We couldn’t match Pixar-level fluidity, but we could pick a style that worked well on mobile and stayed readable. This honesty guided our choices in frame rates, color palettes, and visual effects.
What’s Next
We’re still exploring how far this playable cartoon idea can go — from new recipes to other genres. If you’re building something similar or thinking about mixing animation with gameplay, we’d love to connect and hear how you approach it.
Thanks for reading — and happy building!
💛
The TATOMAMO team
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