The theme was holes, so we put holes in the recipe book, that was our interpretation of the theme and the impetus behind the game. The description of the project states this, and we tried to make it fairly clear that that is the point of the game, is figuring out the missing ingredients based on comparing the known ingredient list to the name and the feedback of the customers. The names always consist of a descriptor about the food, followed by multiple flavors (a list of all the flavors who's strength for the recipe is above the average of the ingredients, followed by the two foods with the most sustenance totals in the meal, so meat and such end up being there when they're in the recipe as they have more sustenance than say a leek, We had a menu planned that would show the flavor profile of the ingredient you were looking at, so that the customer feedback of "too spicy" or "not sweet enough" would give insight into what the missing ingredients are.

We would have loved to have added a tutorial, and had plans on it, but near the end of the jam we were running out of time and had to rushy to even get the game playable so unfortunately it was never completed. This is why a good amount of information can be found on many submitted games' descriptions, because this isn't an uncommon thing to not be able to finish everything enough to have a great tutorial/introduction to the game.

The recipes are always randomly generated per playthrough (Each playthrough based on difficulty a certain number between 4 and 8 ingredients are chosen from a palette of 19 ingredients total, those ingredients are the ones you can find in the level. The recipes are then randomly generated from that subset of ingredients again based on difficulty, with easy having recipes of 3 ingredients, medium 5, hard 7 and hardcore 9, all randomly generated/procedural, and so are the names, coming up with code to take a list of ingredients and turn them into more complex and descriptive names would have likely taken longer than the jam on its own, so we went with a simple but descriptive way of naming things.

We would have loved to, just we started running out of time and just needed to get something working at all first. We plan on polishing it a bit when the judging is over.

thank you so much! We had so much fun working on it! Really appreciate the support

I figured using the 2D lights, considering they're just barely out of preview would be a fun tool to work with in the game, others have said the candles were a bit too bright, which I agree with and will tone down when we polish it up a bit after the judging is complete.

thank you so much!!! I had so much fun with the art and one of our coders did wonders with the lighting. Our musician was a joy to work with! We all had such a fun time with this project so glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for the feedback on the lighting. I wanted to use the new 2D lighting features of Unity's URP since it came out of preview not long ago. Glad you liked it. All the art credit goes to the one above me though, you really did a good job SBS.

thank you for the feedback and kind words!! We are working on making it more clear and really appreciate the input!

Yeah, lack of instructions was something we anticipated as feedback, and feedback that we have indeed gotten. Unfortunately the reason was time, a lack of it near the end. We had many other ideas that didn't make it in because of time, and a tutorial-ish thing was one of them. Glad you enjoyed it as well. It's late for me personally when replying here, but if I remember I'll check your game out tomorrow.

Thanks for your kind review, personally I thought the gameplay felt a little off, but glad you had a good experience with it. Thanks for playing.

The ingredients not being in one spot was a largely intentional design decision. We have/had plans for more features in this game including things like hazards that make the process more intense, as it's pretty relaxing pace now with no time limit (obviously these hazards and such would be optional), but placing ingredients in various places will allow us when expanding this later to use the different locations to our advantage in creating various ways to inject some difficulty into the game.

The customer text in Unity was placed in the bottom right in te dark part of the wall so it was easy to see, and I checked on multiple resolutions and the scaling of the UI worked fine. When it was exported however for some reason that UI no longer matched what I was seeing despite me having tested it in the exact same resolution in the game, so the text ended up being in slightly offset positions and put into the brighter areas. If we had had more time we would have added text boxes above the characters, but we were rushing near the last few hours to finish connection the pieces and getting the game to be playable we had to take a few shortcuts with the UI and such.

Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed the art, https://sofa-bed-studios.itch.io/ worked hard on it.

Wow, thank you very much. Overcooked is a great game it's so nice to get a comparison to it even though I don't really feel the game deserves it in its current state. Thank you for your review.

Thank you! So glad you enjoyed them!

Thank you so much for the feedback we really appreciate it!
We are very excited to keep working on it and will definitely be looking into what you mentioned :)

The original idea was to have a UI element show the flavor profile of ingredients when you stand next to them (when they're eligible to pickup). The candles I tried some to get looking right, but I didn't spend too much time on them, I wanted the area to be dark but to be visible, I probably made the animation a bit too much, we'll tone the candles down on the next update after voting it over.

We originally had a bit larger scope, and intended to have a how to play screen, but as you can see from the "Submitted 12 minutes 33 seconds before deadline" we were scrambling to get the game playable at all. Glad you had fun with it once you figured out what to do. It sucks I had to remove the leaderboards, because for some reason the web requests were either crashing or freezing the game when exported to WebGL. Will definitely have to figure that one out at some point.

Thank you for your feedback! Our artist was inspired by the game when making the art. And we're sorry about the UI but, we were running out of time and wanted to get a playable game out.

I tested the UI with various screen resolutions and it looked fine in Unity, but when exported to WebGL for some reason the text was slightly offset, it was down lower in the dark part of the tiles.

Thanks so much!!

Thank ya! Our musician was top notch he was so nice to work with!

Oh shoot, forgot to change that... dangit ;/ The menus were fairly hastily made as we were running out of time and at the time we hadn't chosen the name of the game yet...

Thank you so much for the feedback and that you had fun!!!!