Star Chef
Class Project, 2024
Star Chef was my team's capstone project for University of Washington's Game Design certificate program. I collaborated with a team of 6, where I was the tech lead / architect of the project. The game is a hybrid cooking-rhythm game where each rhythm section represents a step of a recipe.
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Star Chef - A Unique Cooking/Rhythm Hybrid
Star Chef is a rhythm-based cooking game designed for casual gamers that want to fulfill their chef fantasy. The player controls a chef that is cooking different recipes in a kitchen. The chef moves between stations such as a prep area or a flattop. At these different stations, the player takes part in a DDR-esque rhythm mini-game that represents the chef's cooking action at that station. The player will be awarded 0 to 3 stars for their performance on a recipe, which will contribute to the progression through the overarching story.
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There are two main ways the player progresses in the game. The first is by unlocking new recipes to play and the second is by unlocking customizations for their kitchen. With the recipe progression, the player must go through each recipe and meet a certain star threshold to be able to continue. The player can complete the game by getting 2 stars on most songs, but will require a few 3 star scores as skill checks. The customization system is a little more difficult to complete as the player needs to 3 star each recipe to unlock a new alternate art for each appliance. This allows players who are more skilled or who dedicate more time in the game to see exciting rewards for their investment.
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Project Architecture
When we came up with the idea for Star Chef, we realized that it would be an asset heavy game, with songs and sprites for each recipe and melodies and animations for each ingredient. Starting from the ground up, I needed to design the project in such a way that the whole team could hook up their assets and create new recipe levels while minimally touching the code. To accomplish this, the game uses a single kitchen scene that plays every level, with scriptable Recipes and Ingredients that are played out with a RecipeManager within that scene.
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Here you can see an ingredient prefab on the left, it is a series of notes the player will hit to represent chopping an onion. Next to it, you can see the Scriptable Ingredient that contains that ingredient prefab and all the art assets needed to play the animation associated with it. That scriptable ingredient is composed into a scriptable recipe which contains a list of the recipe’s steps, with each step enumerating the station that the player must go to to trigger the note sequence, as well as various other metadata like the song that plays for the level and the sprites that are shown in the recipe book entry and victory screen. This structure allowed any member of the team to easily create content for the game by adding new scriptable objects and slotting in the art assets.
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