Cooking Diary, from developer MYTONA, is among the most enduringly fashionable informal catering video games of its era.
Now that it has turned 6 years outdated, MYTONA is sharing the recipe for its success. And, sure, it’s actually a recipe. Bon appetit!
Elements
- 431 episodes
- 38 distinctive heroes
- 8,969 parts
- 905,481 guilds
- Occasions and contests
- A touch of humor
- Grandpa Gray’s secret ingredient (learn to the top to seek out out)
Cooking directions
Step 1: Put together the lore
Put together the plot, including twists and humor to style. Add in a beneficiant serving to of colourful characters to create the bottom in your lore.
Subsequent, divide the plot equally into districts and eating places. Starting with Grandpa Leonard Gray’s Burger Joint, progressively roll out the components to an increasing number of districts, from Colafornia to New Yogurt to Schnitzeldorf to Sushijima.
There are 27 districts in complete, every containing new challenges and tales set in 160 eating places, bakeries, and diners. So protect loads of oven area.
Step 2: Add customization
As soon as your lore is prepared, add 8,000 customization gadgets, together with 1,776 outfits (together with 200 for pets) and 440 hairstyles. Then combine in 864 ornamental gadgets for the participant’s house, and 5,600 for his or her eating places.
Step 3: Season with in-game occasions
Now take your base and fold in duties and occasions. Use analytics to steadiness the piquancy of the sport designers’ concepts, mould them into discrete occasions, and sprinkle generously with rewards.
Type the particular occasions into layers, guaranteeing that they style good individually and collectively.
For an instance of how to do that, see the second week of August in Cooking Diary, which featured a superbly constructed tasting menu of 9 completely different occasions, together with Culinary Experiments, Sugar Rush, and extra.
These occasions diversified in taste and magnificence, however all of them harmonized right into a single cohesive feast.
Step 4: Mixing in guilds
Meals is for sharing, and that’s why Cooking Diary incorporates greater than 905,000 completely different guilds, permitting followers to share their outfits and achievements.
It is very important introduce guild occasions and duties progressively to make sure that their flavors complement the dish. For instance, duties assigned to busy guilds have been proven to end in weaker returns than these assigned to guilds not at the moment participating in guild occasions.
Step 5: Don’t be afraid to make errors
Cooking up a recreation is about innovation, and it’s important that you simply’re not afraid to make errors whereas experimenting. Even Cooking Diary has created its share of unsuccessful dishes—although its builders have all the time discovered from them.
For instance, in June 2019 the sport launched pets. Strange pets had been free whereas uncommon pets value Rubies. Hardly anyone purchased them, so the staff pivoted to a Path to Glory occasion, which allowed gamers to earn pets by finishing duties, growing the sport’s income by 42% within the course of.
Step 6: Stick the presentation
When serving a recreation, the primary byte is with the attention. It’s not sufficient to easily create scrumptious flavors and deposit them on the App Retailer, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Retailer, and AppGallery—you additionally have to know how one can current these flavors.
Which means promoting on social media, posting creatively, and using traits. To see the way it’s finished, simply try Cooking Diary’s Instagram, Fb, and X feeds, the place you’ll discover a banquet of contests and actions.
Teaming up with one other chef is a good concept too. For instance, Cooking Diary has collaborated with Netflix’s Stranger Issues prior to now, bringing two units of completely satisfied followers collectively.
And simply final month the sport partnered up with YouTube by way of the Path to Glory occasion, by way of which you’ll be able to win a free two-month subscription to YouTube Premium within the USA, UK, Korea, Japan, Canada, France, and Germany.
Presentation isn’t all the things, after all, however to turn into the second highest ranked time-management recreation of all time, and win awards from IMGA and Webby, a developer must carry its A recreation.
Step 7: Combine it up
A recipe isn’t a lifeless, fastened factor. It retains evolving as new concepts, strategies, and components come alongside. That’s why Cooking Diary is all the time on the transfer, from the balancing to the occasions calendar.
However one factor stays the identical…
Step 8: Grandpa Gray’s secret ingredient
Which is soul.
You may play Cooking Diary for your self on the App Retailer, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Retailer, and AppGallery.