6 Years of Cooking Diary: A Recipe for Success

droidgamers.com:

Cooking Diary is six years old, and developer MYTONIA is ready to share the recipe for its megahit time-management game. 

If you’re a developer yourself, you might just find a few nuggets of wisdom for your own recipes. And if you’re merely a humble player, you might enjoy learning what goes into your favorite casual games. 

Enjoy!

Ingredients

Cooking Instructions

First step: Make the Lore

Start by preparing the plot, remembering to include plenty of humor and twists. Add a vast number of colorful characters, and the plot is ready. 

Segment the plot into restaurants and districts, making sure to start with the Burger Joint, which is owned by your grandfather, Leonard. Gradually layer this with more districts, such as Colafornia, Schnitzeldorf, and Sushijima. 

There are 160 different restaurants, diners, and bakeries in Cooking Diary, distributed across 27 districts—so invite plenty of guests. 

Step 2: Customize

Place your lore on the counter and add up to 8,000 items, including 1,776 outfits, 88 sets of facial features, and 440 hairstyles. Follow these with over 6,500 different decorative items for players’ homes and restaurants.

Depending on your dietary preferences, you can also add pets, along with 200 items of clothing to customize them with.

Step 3: In-game events

At this point, it’s time to fortify your mix with tasks and events. It’s vitally important to use the sharpest possible analytics tool here, complementing the creativity of the game design concepts with precision of high quality data.

The trick with events, apart from seasoning generously with rewards, is to create different but complementary layers, so that each layer tastes as good individually as it does in concert with the ones around it. 

See August for an example. During the second week of that month, Cooking Diary included an impressive nine different courses, from Culinary Experiments to Sugar Rush. They were as enjoyable in isolation as they were together.

Step 4: Guilds

There are more