I enjoyed this for what it was, though it could obviously use a lot of fleshing out. I don't think I'm going to add much that hasn't been said already; but I think the biggest thing is, if you're going to require we find recipes in order to get stats high enough to overcome challenges, there needs to be more to it than just experimentation. Recipe cards could be awarded for accomplishing certain tasks, or better yet, hints that point us in the right direction without just straight-up telling us what to use. Combat can certainly be fleshed out. Automatic battles can work (like in Unicorn Overlord), but even just letting us see what's going on behind-the-scenes gives us more investment in the combat and a better idea of how to improve. I feel like some persistent upgrades would be helpful... but I also know the main point of the game is that your stats depend on what you ate the night before, so I don't want to ruin that conceit with level-ups or equipment. So, how about upgrading your cooking tools instead? Let us get higher stats from recipes, so you keep the gameplay loop while easing up on the need for specific combinations to get the required stats. And I know this is a prototype, and the characters are probably just placeholders, but get some dialogue in there! Support conversations were great in Kitchen Sync, so I want to see Kala and her two boyfriends talk about the situation they're in. But again, we'll see what the final version ends up looking like.
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Thanks for all your detailed feedback! Understand and agree with most of what you've written here. I wanted to try something in the space of the botw cooking system but agree the required nature of the progression loop means it's confusing how you're supposed to progress if you don't stumble upon the perfect combination of ingredients to get what you need. I'll keep iterating on it - the goal is to have a cooking system that retains some level of discovery and creativity if possible. Combat definitely isn't where I'd want it to be in a full product either. I think the tradeoffs of temporary buffs and permanent progression was a good learning for me in this prototype. I think the majority of the buffs should be permanent if I can figure out how to pace the game around that, with occasional temporary buffs for flavor - that mightalso help with backtracking issues. Cooking gear upgrades sound great to me!
Story is definitely something I do expect to add if I start working on a fuller version of this game, so excited to get to that point :)