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🍳 From Kitchen to Code: How We Brought Real Food into Our Cooking Game

When you're making a cooking game, there are two ways to go:
1️⃣ Use cartoony icons and floaty physics that “look like food” — or
2️⃣ Go deeper, and actually treat food like a real system.

We chose option 2. And to do that, we hired a chef.

Yes, for real.

👨‍🍳 Why Our Game Needed a Chef, Not Just a Designer
We’re building Food Festival 3, a family-oriented mobile game where players cook colorful meals in a playful, cartoon world. But we didn’t want this to be just another “tap-the-ingredient” clone.

We wanted realism — not in terms of graphics, but in how the food behaves:

  • How should ground beef respond when you drag a knife through it?
  • What happens when you stack too many soft ingredients?
  • Can a burger actually look playable and still feel like food?

Food Festival 3 Real Burger

Instead of guessing, we embedded a real chef into the game team.
He worked hands-on with our designers to co-create every recipe, based on actual cooking logic. Nothing fake, nothing random — just real culinary rules adapted to touch gameplay.

🔬 Building a Food System That Feels Right
Here’s what we changed because of that collaboration:

Meat physics — we modeled how raw ground meat moves when chopped, squishes when pressed, and chars when grilled.

Meat moves whan chopped

Layer stacking — certain ingredients slide, some hold structure. We rewrote our stacking logic based on real food behavior.

Visual feedback — sauces drip naturally, cheese melts over time, buns compress under pressure.

The goal was immersion through small physical truths — not uncanny realism, but enough tactile logic that your brain says, “that feels right.”

👪 More Than Just Play: Cooking With Your Kids IRL
Food Festival 3 is a no-ads, no-timers, no-fails cooking game for families.
It’s meant to be something you can enjoy with your kid on the couch — and then head to the kitchen and make the burger you just built.

All in-game meals are based on real-life recipes. We're even planning to release downloadable recipe cards post-launch so players can bring the experience into real kitchens.

💭 What Surprised Us
Our chef became a core systems thinker. He spotted design edge cases we missed.

Parents testing the game kept saying, “I want to try this at home.”

Kids love the weird combinations — but only if they behave believably.

Also: when the meat looked too glossy, kids called it “fake.” We toned it down. Realism matters, even in stylized games.

🛠️ Still Cooking…
We’re getting ready for launch, and continuing to improve the feel of food.
We’re also talking to creators to bring in even more real-world recipes and chef-led ideas.

There’s a lot of love behind this game — from food, to code, to cozy moments.

Tags:

gamedev #cookinggame #indiedev #unity #mobilegames #gamephysics #uxdesign #familygames #realrecipes #cozygames #devlog

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