OVERVIEW
Kitchen Clash is a 3D mobile game in which the player competes against an onther player in a cooking competition. Speed, agility, and precision are to be used in order to finish first.
As my first project in Gameloft, I was in charge of half the minigames, as well as the upgrade system of the kitchen tools and the balacing of the fake opponents' AI.
BRIEF
Create a competitive cooking game to appeal both competitive players and cooking games' communities like Cooking Mama's.
PLAYER MOTIVATIONS
Once the concept of the game and the target (competitive and cooking game players) defined, we explored the player motivations by simulating our target on Quantic Foundry for further guidance throughout the ideation phase.
Main player motivations for Kitchen Clash
We could therefore define our game pillars using our main player motivations as well as references of cooking and casual competitive games (like Golf Clash). Main pillars were :
- Online Multiplayer: Quick-fire duels against other players in real time action
- Skill-based Gameplay: Cooking would rely on dexterity and speed with precise and mobile friendly gestures, and simple but hard to master mechanics
- Best Cooking Experience on mobile: Realize all the steps to master an existing recipe, based on real cooking actions like Slicing, Blending, Boiling, Roasting, Grilling, Plating Up. Use cooking gears like a real chef.
GAME LOOP
Kitchen Clash has an Arena system. The player needs to gain trophies (after each win) in order to get to the trophy treshold of the next Arena. To play a game, the player needs to spend an entry fee with an in-game currency that would refill each hour in the shape of a free chest in case they didn't have enough currency.
Example of video mock-up to showcase the flow
Each time the player presses "Play" and an oponent is found, the game triggers a random recipe amongst all unlocked recipes. For each recipe, I would define the amount of mini-games as well as the ingredients used.
For some features like the transition between two mini-games, I would make some mock-ups showing the flow of actions that the game needs to trigger.
Mini-games ideation
Kitchen clash's gameplay consists in making players play a definite list of mini-games in order to follow a recipe. The player scoring the most total points for each round (aka mini-game) wins the game.
Each mini-game was therefore treated as a game itself, each having their own ideation, prototyping, playtesting and iterating steps.
I was responsible for the design and balancing of both the pan-flipping game and the sauce-dripping mini-games.
Sauce dripping mini-game
Pan-flipping mini-game
OPPONENTS
As the game had a versus format and the prototype would display fake opponents, we needed to implate AIs to simulate their scoring.
The fake opponent's scoring is an irregular addition of scores that the player could see on the opponent's total score on top of the screen. The amount of scoring and the timing were adapted depending on each mini-game to make it feel real (for example some had a definite amount of scores showing-up every X seconds, others had a final score only at the end of the mini-game).
The higher the Arena, the higher the oponent's score range is, with controlled randomness added in each score.
PLAYTESTS
Alongside our UX/UI designer, I hosted internal playtests in which I asked players to play our prototype with both the UX designer and I watching them play. We would write down any oral reactions ("This is so hard", "What should I do now?", "That was easy"...) as well as non-verbal feedbacks (hesitating, skipping tutorial steps...).
Players were chosen depending on their gaming background and affinities to stay close to our target.
Results were centered in a folder with positive and negative feedbacks, alongside first-hand solutions and iteration ideas for negative feedbacks.
The first playtests would arrive around 1 month after starting our prototype and we would do up to 1 or 2 playtests a month during the following 2 months of development until release.
Excerpt of playtests results for Kitchen Clash:
