Work












Role:

Timeline:

Tools:


Illustrator, Designer, Software Developer
Sept 2023 - Dec 2023
Adobe Illustrator, Procreate



Project Overview

Clarissa’s Kitchen is an interactive cooking experience where players can drag and drop ingredients into a virtual bowl to create recipes. The objective is to correctly combine a list of ingredients to bake a cake while avoiding any incorrect items.

I was inspired to create this game by my experiences in a class during my freshman year, where I developed a storybook that used handpose to flip the pages. Additionally, the concept also drew from my potential Capstone idea, which centers on an interactive book.

I’ve always enjoyed cooking and baking when I am home and have time, and I wanted to combine my hobby within this project. Overall, this project has been really fun to work with so far and I’m excited to see where it can go next.


Ideating

Storyboard


Game Inspiration

The design of the game was inspired by the aesthetics of Cooking Mama, while the sound design and end sequences are similar to the high pressure and intense themes in Hell’s Kitchen. The juxtaposition between the two core ideals were fun to play around. 

Style Guidelines
I wanted to stick by a style guideline to make the design thorough and consistent. 




Development
I wanted to start with dragging the images because then I could get a good understanding of the movement and how I wanted the interaction between my images to work before moving it over to use handPose.

I went to office hours to talk about the interaction between my images and decided to start by console logging results before actually having images swap.
 
Two different p5 sketches I ended up with:

1. A sketch that successfully integrated the drag and drop interaction.

2. One where the mouse can drag the images and the console log detects whether or not the images are inside the bowl or not. 



Next Steps:
  1. Successfully combine the two sketches I completed for the midterm (one was responsive with the image overlap detection, and the other has handpose implemented properly.
  2. Figure out how to shuffle the placement of the ingredients.
  3. Add in a timer.
  4. Add in sound to make the game more immersive.
  5. Add in an instruction page.


User Feedback:
  • Include instructions for the game so players not in our ML class know what to do.
  • Make ingredient and bowl overlap feedback more responsive (add in affect to help users understand the ingredient was placed in the bowl).
  • Create transitionary animations such as mixing the bowl.


Struggles:
I really really struggled figuring out how to shuffle the ingredients. Originally I had the images shuffle throug a for loop. I wanted to shuffle the placement of the images each time the game restarts to make the game more complicated and not so stationary.

Solution:
I ended up using the pre-set placements, and then shuffled the ingredients through those same spots instead of randomly placing them around the screen each time the user restarts the game.



Results