Undercooked

A fan-made vertical slice.

        

  

Game concept

In Undercooked, we have to process ingredients (chop & cook), mount them into plates, and finally serve the orders as they pop out as fast as you can, thus earning more points.

More complexity arises from twists on the levels, like physically separating parts of the kitchen or adding obstacles, different recipes, and processes. Still, for this project, I set a clear goal to keep the scope small by building all the core mechanics to have a tight game loop using just one level.

Tools

Started with

Switched to

Core mechanics

• Selection of Interactables based on a mix of proximity and orientation.
• Pick/Drop items base on the context.
• Raw ingredients from their crates.
• Chop items.
• Cooking Pan, with burning and cooking timers.
• Delivering (and evaluating of) plates.
• Player control can be swapped between two independent avatars.
• Player movement and actions carefully recreated the feel are very of the original game.
• Trash
• Sink
• Orders Panel, with an animated UI

Interesting points

• Asynchronous programming in conjunction with Coroutines.
• IPickable interface and Interactable Abstract class
• Extensive use of Pattern Matching to handle the interaction between items.
• Use of the new (event-based) Unity Input System, allowing a seamless change between the keyboard and different brands of controllers.
• Several Particle Systems: smoke, steam, dust, stars.
• Use of a personal Unity Package
• Some shaders in Shader Graph

Auxiliary tools

• Cameras powered by CineMachine
• UI animation using LeanGUI and LeanTransition
• FBX Exporter - makes it easy to send geometry and animation to any application that supports FBX and back again with minimal effort.

Disclaimer: Undercooked is a fan-made game, inspired by one of my favorite franchises: Overcooked, an amazing couch-coop game. All assets were created from scratch by me. This project doesn’t have any commercial goals or any legal affiliation with the original game or company. This project is meant only as a fun and challenging exercise of recreating a proven game without worrying about game design, focusing on programming and art creation, forcing myself out of “tutorial-hell”.