OctoChef

OctoChef is a student-made physics-based game where the goal is to make delicious ramen. We are a team of four people (two developers and two artists) and we made this game over the course of three months. The game requires cooperation between both players to maximize quality and quantity of dishes served within a time limit.

You can play the game (for free!) on Windows and Linux on our itch.io page.

Meet the team

Features

To make the best noodles, you must learn the art of ramen. These are your main interactions within the kitchen:

- Grab. Move any ingredient or tool around the kitchen.

- Cut. Don't serve huge pieces of meat, you can use the knife to arbitrarily cut meats and scallion.

- Cook. We're not making sushi, so all meats must be cooked on the pan before serving.

Extra Mechanics

- Drop. If you really messed up, don't worry. The staff will clean up after you, so just throw things off the counter without fear and you'll get a new one back.

- Hatch. To deliver a (hopefully) finished dish, you can lift the hatch door and place the bowl inside.

- Cooking guide. Forgot your years of training? No worries, just pick up the convenient guide at the bottom right of the counter.

- Broth dispenser. Pull the lever down to get a fresh stream of broth from its infinite reserves.

- Order ticket. Your current goal is always shown here, with a fresh new recipe each time!

Scoring

As a way of incentivizing both quantity and quality we measure your performance in two different ways:

- Stars. Your overall quality of dishes. Even one bad serving will tank this score!

- Points. Goes up with each dish, taking into account its quality. It rewards quantity, unlike the stars.

Controls

Note that there are also keyboard controls, if you don't have two controllers (though we don't recommend them!). You can use WASD to move around, arrow keys up/down to move vertically, and hold space to grab items.

Development

We decided to make all the interactables work with an outline shader, whilst the environment does not have one. This makes them really stand out so you know what you can mess with. This also served to recreate the Ghibli/anime aesthetic we were inspired by.

As our game is played with a static camera angle, we iterated a lot on the kitchen. You can see some of the process below, from idea to finished!

One huge challenge we faced was making moving physics objects around the scene fluid and intuitive, while avoiding common pitfalls with physics-driven games (such as objects clipping or getting stuck). It's by no means perfect but the code has come a long way from the prototype stages.

As part of the development process, our team wrote a weekly devlog on itch.io. To make sure we're all on the same page, we made an extensive art bible (see below) and tech document which outlines every little bit of how the game art works and how its development is done.

Thanks for reading!