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A cooking game

March 8th, 2006 (Visited 15546 times) Tags:

Not that long ago, I was talking with the guys here about a concept that had come to me, for a puzzle game that taught you how to cook. Now here it is, for the Nintendo DS.

The way I had envisioned it was that it was a time-based and physics-based challenge at first; you had multiple burners, and a simple dish to make. You would have to try to coordinate all the dishes to come out at the right level of “cooked” and the right temperature, all simultaneously, so they could be delivered to a table. (Yes, this comes from watching Gordon Ramsay yell at people in Hell’s Kitchen).

Then I thought it could expand — input data about the cooking rates of meat, about factors like juiciness, about which pices go together, and so on, and the game could actually become educational and teach you how to make certain recipes.

The idea, broadly, was that by delivering the dish both warm and properly prepared, you would advance to eventually cooking whole meals with multiple dishes, managing a lot of burners, doing side tasks, and so on.

Alas, the DS game looks like it’s mostly a cooking wrapper around more of those stylus challenges; I can’t tell from the video whether there’s gameplay beyond the rhythm games and the call-response gameplay of drawing a given shape on the screen.

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Mike's News Page wrote on March 13th, 2006 at 10:01 am:

The Sunday Poem: Housebuilding Near Montague Farm Hail in San Diego PowerPoint Presentation – Putting the Fun in Functional Shaping perceptions Midnighters Another prescription/crystal ball Darniaq has seen the future of MMOsA cooking game CAN MMOs be sandboxes?

Raph’s Website » A cooking game wrote on November 19th, 2007 at 6:02 pm:

[...] A cooking game [...]

Dranore said on March 8th, 2006 at 12:50 pm:

This actually is not an original concept is was done, again in Japan, a number of years ago on the PSX. It was called “Ore No Ryouri” or “My Cooking” as it’s English title and was released exclusively in Japan in 1999. More info and a few screen shots HERE. The idea is fairly similar, obviously a game like this fares well on the DS as the ability to use the stylus as a cooking tool is appropriate. On the PSX I image the ergonomics are quite a bit different, instead using the dual analog sticks to control the hands. And conceptually the game appears a bit different as well. The game focused around preparing dishes for customers. Also apparently offering different kinds of restaurants. This is the first instance that I’m aware of in executing the game dynamic.

This is an example of why Japan is way ahead of us in terms of exploring ideas for games commercially because their culture supports more interesting titles. That’s my personal opinion anyways. Usually such games aren’t brought over unfortunately as asthetically they are quite different and especially when it revolves around something cultural like food or music (though fortunately “Taiko Drum Master” made it over mostly unscathed). I’d be even a bad translation of either of the aforementioned cooking games.

I would MOST DEFINITELY buy a game like the one you describe. Cooking is an excellent candidate for a “Serious Game”. It’s an excellent dynamic to explore virtually as one could then prepare an unlimited ammount of food experimentally without wasting resources in doing so. Unfortunately TASTE has yet to make the digital/analog transformation… so there’s a pretty big caveat there in terms of limitations. But in terms of communicating the audio/visual aspects and teaching food science… can’t beat it. Hell I’d consider making it myself. I love to cook and love food science… but that’s something for another day.

Raph said on March 8th, 2006 at 12:55 pm:

I don’t think we need to actually simulate taste beyond saying “if you accidentally put in five times as much cumin as the recipe calls for, we’ll say that it’s not what the customer wanted.”

Now, ideally, we write this game in Chef, of course. Then it’ll be fun game, serious game, and self-referential art object all in one!

brandonnn said on March 8th, 2006 at 1:07 pm:

Though Nintendo brought the idea of the cooking game to the consciousness of the blog and forum set, first in concept talks regarding Revolution and later when Taito revealed Cooking Mama, the PS1 and PS2 have been home to several cooking games more like what you describe for the past few years.

The specific burner-coordination parts are right up the alley of a number of Media Interactive Inc. titles like Yakiniku Bugyou Bonfire and Yakitori Musume, but there’s also more comprehensive games, as well. The Yoshinoya chain spawned its own game, and even better is the CoCo Ichibanya version, which replicates curry house chaos down to greeting customers on their way in and out of the door.

The granddaddy of them all, though, is SCEI’s own Ore no Ryouri, which used the DualShock to simultaneously put players through the paces of every aspect of cooking life, from pouring beers to chopping vegetables to chasing down deadbeat dine-and-dashers. Track this one down before the rest (PSone Books copies are cheap and easy to find).

None might be as practical as what you might be looking for, but all put the emphasis more on multitasking than it appears Cooking Mama will.

Dranore said on March 8th, 2006 at 1:41 pm:

::pokes brandonnn:: I’m familiar with the “Chain” games, they’re interesting as well – also focusing around the “serve the customers” dynamic. I did mention Ore no Ryouri already. And I don’t feel Nintendo brought the idea to people who watch Japan for games. I’ve seen Ore no Ryouri mentioned many a times in blogs… but I guess it depends what you read. Anyways…

You couldn’t actually WRITE the game in Chef obviously… but it would make a great scripting system for such a game. That way people could contribute “recipies” to the game. You could easily assemble sets of recipies and you could set up progression by working through a “cookbook” which would contain “recipies”. Ideally such recipies would illustrate different principles of cooking and eventually begin to build upon those basics.

For example, there is a book simply titled, “Sauces” by a James Peterson. It’s an MOSTLY exhaustive tome about PRIMARILY western sauce making (though he does delve a reasonable amount into eastern fare). The book goes through what are refered to as the “Mother Sauces” in classical French cuisine and shows all of the suauces one cane make from them. Making such a recipe set availible in interactive form would be great. It would allow you to make more than a cookbook because it can be referential and dynamic – for example – you could prepare the veloute recipe and then it could let you know of where the recipe can go from there – for example – it could present sauce Aurora as an option whence you completed the Veloute (which is basically Veloute with chopped, seeded, and peeled tomatoes added to the sauce).

You could really translate any cooking BOOK into a serious game form and have it be significanly more effective.

Raph said on March 8th, 2006 at 2:06 pm:

Ironically, I can’t cook worth a damn. That’s what made me interested. What he heck is a veloute sauce?

chabuhi said on March 8th, 2006 at 4:21 pm:

Restaurant Empire – now THERE was a game with potential – too bad it was rushed out the door with the other Sims knock offs … like Hotel Giant. I went back and loaded up Restaurant Empire after Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen ended … I *really* wanted to like the game that badly.

Dranore said on March 8th, 2006 at 10:13 pm:

Veloute is a ‘mother sauce’ which I believe is based on…… a veal broth and a fatty thickener… cold butter is common. While off topic, given your programatic inclination… if you’re at all interested in cooking… it would definitely be advisable to check out Cooking For Engineers. Recipies are usually quality and the BEST part about it is the information design. He approaches the recipie design itself in the best way I’ve seen done. Pictures for every logical step and then the actual chart at the end is the best… Here’s Cheesecake , for an example. Scroll to the bottom of the page before the comments. Ingredients in a table with their quantities, brackected with their action and any related time information. At the top any prep requirements. Brilliant. Enough off topic. Been a big fan, though I feel the site has gotten a little sloppier in terms of organization over time. ehehe… Great site though.

Jeff Ward said on March 9th, 2006 at 12:15 pm:

Dranore:
Personally, I like the work of Alton Brown, though Cooking For Engineers is also good.

I’d also had similar ideas for cooking games, mostly based on ingredient combinations and not fast pased arcade action, though I would love to give Ore No Ryouri a try. I envisioned a Iron Chef game, where you would have to time dishes to be finished in an hour, and use integrate a central ingredient. Add onto it the ability to read recipies you made afterword and I think it would be an interesting game. However, I don’t even want to *think* about the aI that would be needed to judge whether what you cooked was “good” and offer you feedback on it. Just blech.

Dranore said on March 9th, 2006 at 1:40 pm:

Who DOESN’T like Alton Brown? I merely assume people know who he is at this point. “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee (history/science and uses of most food) and “Cookwise” by Shirley O’Corriher(science behind GOOD food – ie – what makes good food good) are excellent reads in the paper realm. If you have trouble remembering what stuff is, then it’s “The Food Lover’s Companion” your after (unfortunately massively lacking in eastern food – though I do have a Japanese food dictionary as well that is nice).

Iron Chef would be a very tough game indeed. Mainly because iron chef requires the actual creation of original dishes based on your own knowledge of the food. The real Iron Chef is pretty much impossible to accomplish in real life unless you have a very strong background in cooking and know the ingredients and their interactions very well. That, in my mind, is the tough part of an Iron Chef game, not so much the judging tasting. It’s easy to break down flavor and if you attribute ingredients to cooking time to water content and flavor… you could probably work out a system to rank flavor of dishes… then judges would be simple… you’d have (if IC Japan) government official, actor, bimbo-du-jour, and food critic. Each one would be keen towards certain flavors and have various snesitivities as to what consititues a perfect dish in terms of taste/originality/presentation.

If you aren’t familiar with Iron Chef – a quick primer. Iron Chef is a show that originated in Japan in the earlier 1990′s. The premise is simple: An excentric Japanese billionaire (Chairman Kaga) who loves food desires to create a battleground for chefs to have it out to create the most flavorful and inovative dishes imaginable. He creates this battlefield and calls it “Kitchen Stadium”. He then seeks out Japan’s best Chinese, French, and of course Japanese chefs who are the “Home Team” if you will – The Iron Chefs. The chairman invites master chefs (primarily from Japan) from around the world who specialize in a variety of cuisines to challenge the Iron Chefs in a one hour cook off based around the accentuation of a theme ingredient which is unknown until just before the battle begins. The chefs are given matching kitchens in terms of equipment and availiblity of the best ingredients you can buy. The show has alot of pomp and pagentry in Japan that’s MOSTLY lost in the American version (which is really too bad in my mind – though it’s still pretty good). There are comentators who are guests and resident experts who discus the goings on of the battle in a play-by-play manner. The chefs prepare their dishes and they are judged as mentioned above the taste, presentation (or plating as it’s called), and originality with the brunt of points going towards taste. It’s a sports dynamic with subjective metrics. It makes for some intense drama and I highly recommend checking it out (Food Network in the US currently)… AND it uses music from the movie Backdraft. It’s really one of the best shows ever.

You’d have to make the basic discussed cooking game just to consider making a real Iron Chef game… hehe… I mean you COULD gum it down into minigames and it might prove interesting. You would take on the role of the iron chef and based upon your success in the minigames… that would affect your flavor profiles of your food and challengers would come to challenge you. Then you could have a “Tournament of Iron Chefs” as a sort of topper (there were actually a number of such tournaments held in Japan and they’re mostly unseen here unforunately… and it’s at one of these that they finally announce the death of the Chairman Kaga character in Japan which effectively ended the series there at the last one of those special produced there – of course it was fugu poisoning).

A cooking game

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