Last year I made a little game for Space Cowboy Jam with my good friend Matthew Breit. Inspired by one particular scene from Cowboy Bebop, we decided to make a silly cooking simulator. He modeled some vegetables, I coded some menus, we wrote some goofy dialogue, and slapped together Stir Fry Blues in a couple of weeks.
Sadly, the version we made within the time constraints of the game jam was pretty lousy (we placed 45th out of 60 overall.) It had no audio, the menus were ugly, and the NPC dialogue was repetitive. Most egregiously, we still had a placeholder screen for the cooking animations. After the jam, we simply left the project in unfinished limbo for months.
Over the Christmas holidays, I took a pass at improving Stir Fry Blues to the point that I would no longer be ashamed of it. I cleaned up the UI, added some creative-commons audio, and wrote logic for the NPCs to recognize over 30 recipes. To make the cooking animations, I took what we already had (3D modeled food) and simply added physics. Watching a loaf of bread boiling in a pot adds immensely to the game’s humour.
You can play Stir Fry Blues in your browser with the Unity Web Player, or download it:
Play Stir Fry Blues (itch.io)
Download (Windows)
Download (Mac OSX)
Though I’m quite proud of the final product, making a game that’s entirely menu-driven and has lots of custom content isn’t actually much fun. Writing the data structures for the ingredients (their prices, taste values, expiration, etc.) felt like I was developing CMS software. At least I learned a lot about C# and Unity while doing so! For my next side project, I’d definitely prefer to tackle a more mechanics-driven game.
