Description

CPU-Chef is a simple cooking simulator which requires you to cook……a bit more creatively~ Using apps on your computer to overheat your CPU, get to a correct temperature, and cook the perfect steak a customer wants! But be wary chef~ steak isn’t the only thing that can be fried! Your computer will bluescreen and crash if the CPU is too heated!

This is a game made in the Toronto Game Jam, it has been invited to showcase in toronto, gotten a few thousand downloads on itch.io, and millions of views on asian social media such as X, bilibili, or Weibo~ How lovely it is to see sooo many put on a smile when they see or play our game!

My Role

• UI Design/Artist
• Programmer
• Gameplay Designer

Tools

• Unity
• Aseprite
• Miro
• Photoshop
• Excel
• Word

My Work

• Gamplay Programming: Programming most gameplay elements for this game including temperture control, UI, Steak Cook.
• UI Design: Designed UI apperence and interactions.
• Art: Drew UI interface and art like windows, icons, pause, etc.
• Others: Made serveal HUDs, SFX, and UX changes.

Development

Ideation

TOJam is a 3 day game jam, we used around half a day before we nailed down our idea: Cooking with a CPU, before that, we had alot of other random thoughts…… We didn’t have the time to draw out fancy concept arts, so we did very quick doodles that represent how each game would be played in a semi-story board format.

Design

We discovered 2 key gameplay points: How to make the cooking process interesting, and how do the player “cook”?

After a while of discussion, we decided to make the cooking process hard to control, meaning it is easy over or undercook your steak, a little bit of chaos and few variable to look after, challenging the player’s attention and skills, seemed to be the correct recipe to make putting raw meat on a piece of metal entertaining. We even did a little bit of math, to create a formula that makes the SteakCook% and CPUTemperature inteaction at just the right speed, making it challenging, but not fustrating.

How the player cooks is also interesting, we want the controls to be as unusual as possible, so to cook, instead of staring and fliping the steak, we decided you need to open and close apps to control the temperature! We made a computer and created the operations one would usually do on a computer, to make it feel as realistic as possible: Opening apps, drag and drop, and just fitting everything in your screen.

Develop

Due to our team’s aligned goals and clear vision for the project, production phase went fairly smooth. I was responsible for most of the programming, UI creation, small bit of art assets, UX and HUD(highlight, ticks and cross). Suprisingly enough, I also did sound design in this one! I wasn’t satisfied with free sfx online, so I recorded some of my own such as steak frying and dumping trash.

Of course, I wasn’t rich enough to buy a steak just to record the sound, so I used the second best thing: frying ice cubes:)

Build

We manage to complete this project ahead of time, which gave us a few extra hours to fix minor bugs, improve UX, and add small easter eggs in the game. A few hours before it is due, we tested the build, ran a few internal playtests, and kept polishing untill minutes before submition.

And the result was great! Our project was liked at the showcase, had a few feedbacks and friendly comments on itch! This is a really suprising and enjoyable experience!