Vibe Coding a Time Management Cooking Game

For my first gaming project, I wanted to take myself back to the 2000s.

Cooking games like “Cake Mania” were at the height of their popularity, and I always assumed the genre would last through the ages. Honestly, it hasn’t. Overcooked, developed by Ghost Town Games, easily holds the largest “market share” of the genre among PC gamers – but interestingly, it’s built around co-op, and doesn’t offer much of a home for solo players.

The earlier emphasis on PC gamers matters, because the genre has been almost entirely absorbed by mobile. And it’s a natural fit.

The premise behind cooking games is more or less always the same: time management, delivered through increasingly complex inputs – “orders.” I’ve always been deeply fascinated by time management games, and really by anything that forces the player to create order out of chaos.

Cooking games do suffer from one very noticeable design flaw. Outside of clicking things where they “ought” to go, these games don’t have many interactive elements. Say I have a patty that needs to cook for ten seconds before it goes on a bun. The only way to make that more complex is to add small steps in between: maybe the patty rests on a separate plate for five seconds, or gets smashed before it hits the bun. A working progression system is critical – but if the only lever I have is adding more steps (more clicks), the game is ultimately bound by how fun it is to drag a mouse around. On mobile, developers can build fun, chaotic systems out of simple taps, without asking anyone to fling a cursor around at mach speed.

How can we innovate on this genre for a PC audience while remaining true to the original games?

The answer is a very humble: I have no idea.

Although I’m still deep in the ideation phase for this project, I wanted to start building some basic prototypes now. The first iterations were rough – incorrect placeholder assets, overly strict timing requirements, a buggy scoring system, and so on. After hours of debugging and testing, I realized how important a dev console is, and immediately built one designed to scale: it can hook into any adjustable value in the game, including ones I haven’t implemented yet.