Overview / Usage

Open your fridge, choose the ingredients, examine, chop, seasoning, heat, and taste them. During the lockdown, you start to learn how to cook from your dear grandma.

Nainai’s Recipe is a game that captures the essence, sounds, and tastes of home-cooking through stylized naturalism. In the process of meal prep, players unwrap a family story about how we lived and stayed connected in a special way during 2020, and a tribute to the simple caring power of learning our cultures through food. The game is currently under development by two recent graduates from NYU’s Game Center.

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!

Links:

Game Demo: nainaisrecipe.com
Twitter Account: @nainairecipe
Email: nainais.recipe@gmail.com

Team:

Fan Fang, Mai Hou
From NYU Game Center

Awards:

A MAZE. / Berlin 2021 Finalist

Methodology / Approach

Aesthetic & technical problem solving

In the initial phase of setting the style and feel of our game space for Nainai’s Recipe(NNR) we developed our basic guidelines. We want it to be a detailed home that would embody the cultural tradition of cooking to be warm, but not overwhelming. We broke this down to three core aspects, in the art direction, the interaction choices, and the narrative system.

We began by designing a few pieces of the environmental assets in depth. With our design pillars in mind, we first put our attention to realism in every detail, referencing photos or real items around us. After filling up a small corner of our game’s kitchen workspace, the result was unsatisfying; it was too specific and complex for players to relate easily, and distracting from their gameplay. After multiple iterations on the level of detail, color scheme, and the coding design behind cooking actions provided, we settled on a minimal expressive realism, a 3-dimensional rendering of a more open kitchen work area within a living space, under soft lighting, colorful shadow and a soothing visual palette that nevertheless remains to energize through complementary color choices.

As a simulation game, we want to give players the experience of cooking Chinese food from start to finish, feeling the specific raw textures of ingredients, the processes of heat, steam, etc. To tackle this, we took notes from our own and others’ experiences of food preparation to highlight our game and its dynamic systems, observing which part of the cooking process people enjoy the most. We followed up with multiple rounds of tuning and testing to make the game evolution as expressive as it was realistic. In our current DEMO, we’ve kept the focus of player actions on the most satisfying moments of cutting and stir-frying to demonstrate our intentions.

In other cooking games, the majority of ingredient cross-sections are achieved by mapping pre-made textures. These pre-made textures are rarely of high quality or well-aligned, and 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.

Currently, there are 3 layers for rendering the food's appearance during cooking phases that involve a combination of object state management and physics tracking;

Firstly, we provide an ingredient object with a hint color which will be affected by its state of “doneness” as well as the accompanying presence of oil or sauce condiments. Secondly, we track specific positions on the ingredient object that touch the oil and wok when it is turned on and render a burn area for each position with noise and gradient, affected by the time it stays cooking. Finally, we render a glossy layer outside of the ingredient that is covered by oil.

Interaction design minimalism

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.

To do this, we had to face the challenge of deciding where to simplify our game’s interactions. In NNR, most interactable objects like kitchenware or foods have more than one action assigned to them, to replicate real life. For example, in our game a wok can be tossed or held, a piece of food can be grabbed and examined. On the other hand, a mouse button has two available actions, click and hold. We narrowed down the problem to delineate the rules of interaction in verb categories, to separate and assign. This was an additional struggle as player experience varies a lot with different people, as does the significance of a cooking moment over another. We received a range of contradictory feedback, spent time changing it back and forth, and testing on both new and recurring players. After listing all our game verbs into two different sets of the control schemes, we tested with a larger group, noting all the player concerns. We analyzed whether it really derived from the interaction design of our controls or from gameplay options, where there was overlap, then finalized our current version.

Exploration

We want to provide an experience that is as comprehensive as possible, so we started to explore what aspects of cooking we can bring in the game, with attention to feel. Looking at the contrasts of feeling food digitally versus in real life can be really interesting. Where we lose senses like smell and taste, but we can strengthen sight and hearing. Thus, we started our exploration of translating the senses, accentuating moments like the physics of food pieces sliding off a knife, the sound of the chopping board, the light of heat bubbles, and the crackle of sizzling oil. In the demo, we’ve also added a beta version feature, at any point in the game, players can examine their food’s taste, where we overlay the image with an evaluation of saltiness, doneness, and its original flavor to give players extra information of the changes of their food while they cook. Having received a positive response to our experiments, we will keep iterating and explore this direction further.

Finally, the connotation of family love is naturally held within food making. However, we needed to find a balance between the tactile play of our first-person meal prep, with a realistic narrative of communicating with one’s grandma. The player’s meal is connected to an original duo of characters with a story and an intention to connect their isolations and distance through this daily act. It occurs in a chosen moment in time, with holidays and calendar dates in an empty kitchen. It was important to us to keep this light and positive, and have a character story as a backdrop that enriches the moments of cooking, rather than a separate mode that needed bridging. To do this we leaned into the timely mode of communication that is an in-game cell phone for the main character, using it for both narrative intros, tutorialization, positive affirmations, and variation throughout the cooking experience. With a blend of photo and text sending, we let the players play with a mix of adaptive and scripted responses between their player character and a quirky grandma that unfolds in natural segments when the players choose to interact with the phone that can be taken in and out of the foreground of our first-person interface, and take the place other game objects in the kitchen. In this way, we hope we have achieved a relatable blend of options that mix feelings of familiarity and discovery, and as their connection to the kitchen grows, make players come back for more.

Technologies Used

Hardware: Intel Core i7-9700, Intel Thunderbolt 3, TASCAM DR-22WL

Game Engine: Unity

Unity Tech: Compute Shader, Cinemachine, Post-Processing, UI Toolkit, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Cloud Diagnostics

Unity Library: Rewired, FMOD, Yarn Spinner, Shapes, Odin Inspector

Art Pipeline: Blender, Substance, Photoshop, Procreate

Audio/Video Authoring: Adobe Audition, Reaper, FMOD, Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve

Collaboration: Notion, Slack, Zoom, Git, GitHub, VSCode Live Share

IDE: Jetbrains Rider, VSCode

CI/CD: GitHub, Slack, Unity Cloud Build

Feedback Collection: Trello

Other links

• A MAZE. / Berlin 2021 Finalist
• PCGamer Press
• Twitter: @nainairecipe
• Game Website

Collaborators