Case File 005 — Interactive Game

Chef's Plaza

A cozy food-assembly game where players inherit their grandmother's dessert shop, prepare customer orders, and build the business one day at a time.

Role: Designer & Developer
Timeline: Fall 2025
Team: Aatmann Patel, Brianna Sun, Chaehyun Chung, Mia Yan, Milena Synek
Tools: p5.js, HTML/CSS/JS, Procreate

Play the game

01 — Overview

About the project

Chef's Plaza is a food-assembly game inspired by Good Pizza, Great Pizza. Players inherit a small dessert shop from their grandmother and serve a continuous stream of customers by assembling cupcakes and drinks.

The project began as a larger idea involving several food shops and owners. Because of the limited development timeline, our five-person team narrowed the scope to one fully functioning dessert shop.

My role focused on:

Visual and interface design
Start, story, shop, and ending screens
Illustrations for the store interior and exterior
Integrating artwork into the game
Patience-bar design and development
Progression and local-storage logic

Early storyboard sketch mapping the shop's progression from the first few days to unlocking new stores, plus a rough sketch of the end-of-day receipt — Early storyboard — mapping the shop's progression, from first few days to unlocking new stores.

Early prototype with placeholder colored circles standing in for cupcake layers, testing how they connect and stack — Early prototype — testing how cupcake layers connect, before any art existed.

02 — Player Journey

Designing the player journey

The experience begins with a small narrative moment rather than placing the player directly into the shop.

On a player's first visit, they receive a mysterious letter from their grandmother explaining that they will inherit her dessert store. The letter introduces the setting and gives the game a warmer emotional starting point.

I designed and developed the progression between the main interface states:

Start screen
Grandma's letter
Store exterior
Store interior and gameplay
End-of-day report

Local storage records the current day — returning players can skip the letter and walk straight into the shop.

First-time players experience the full opening sequence, from sealed letter to storefront, while returning players are trusted to already know the way in.

Grandma's letter, a sealed cream envelope with a dark red wax seal, sitting against a plain background — Grandma's letter — sealed and waiting on the counter.

Illustrated exterior of the dessert shop — a pink building with a cupcake-shaped roof, a striped awning, and a Dessert Shop sign, flanked by trees — The shop exterior — cupcake roof and all, once the letter is opened.

End-of-day report screen from the finished game — Day 2 summary reading Customers Served: 6 and Total Coins Earned: 19, framed by a torn paper receipt with illustrated cupcakes, cherries, and an iced drink — The end-of-day report — customers served and coins earned, tallied up before the next day begins.

03 — Shop Interface

Building the shop interface

I created the visual direction for the dessert shop, including the start screen, letter, exterior, interior, and interface elements.

The goal was to make the game feel warm, playful, and approachable. The illustrated setting helped distinguish the experience from a purely functional drag-and-drop prototype and supported the story of inheriting a family-run shop.

The prep counter interior — bowls of batter, cupcake liners, a tray of toppings, an oven, an empty assembly zone, a blender, and baskets of oranges and strawberries — The prep counter — ingredients, oven, blender, and assembly zone, all within reach.

During gameplay, the interface needed to display several systems at once:

Customer orders
Available ingredients
Assembly and serving zones
Customer patience
Coins earned
The current day and timer

I worked on integrating the artwork into the code and making sure these elements remained understandable without overwhelming the central preparation area.

Customer

Cupcakes

Drinks

Toppings

Blender

04 — Assembling & Serving

Assembling and serving orders

The central interaction asks players to drag ingredients into an assembly zone in the correct order.

Base

Vanilla, chocolate, or marble — the foundation every cupcake starts with.

Frosting

Piped on top of the base — can't be dragged into place until a base is already sitting in the zone.

Topping

Cherries, sprinkles, or Oreo crumbles — the final layer, dependent on the frosting beneath it.

Drinks

Coffee, matcha, orange, or smoothie — a simpler one-ingredient pour, no stacking required.

Each layer depends on the one beneath it, preventing frosting or toppings from floating independently. Once assembled, the player drags the completed item to the customer's order bubble, and the game provides immediate feedback:

WAITING

CORRECT

WRONG

A correct order turns the bubble green and plays a clear sound; an incorrect order turns it red and plays an error sound. Coins are awarded based on accuracy and speed.

Underneath the interface, dragged ingredients are stored as individual items but move visually as one assembled object. When the order is submitted, the system separates the item names and compares them with the customer's requested recipe.

Mid-development screenshot — a customer requesting a vanilla strawberry cupcake, with a base and frosting ready to assemble and a patience bar at full green — Mid-development build — the order comes in, ingredients ready to drag.

Mid-development screenshot — the same order served correctly against a green background, with the patience bar nearly empty and red — Mid-development build — served correctly, patience bar nearly out of time.

Finished-game screenshot — a customer requesting an iced orange drink, with ingredients, cups, and a blender laid out across the counter and zero coins earned so far — Final build — a new order comes in, counter fully stocked.

Finished-game screenshot — a sprinkle-topped cupcake sitting finished in the assembly zone, matching the customer's order bubble, with 24 coins earned — Final build — order assembled and matched, ready to serve.

05 — Patience & Difficulty

Creating pressure through patience

I designed and coded the customer patience bar to introduce urgency into the game.

Each customer arrives with an order and a limited amount of patience. As time passes, the bar decreases, encouraging the player to assemble and serve the item quickly.

FRESH

IMPATIENT

ALMOST GONE

The game becomes more difficult as the days progress because customers become less patient. This creates a simple difficulty curve without changing the fundamental interaction.

At the end of each day, the game displays a progress report before beginning the next cycle. The loop can continue indefinitely, allowing the player to improve their speed and accumulate coins over time.

06 — Reflection

Reflection and future development

Chef's Plaza succeeded as a functional food-assembly prototype, but its final scope was much smaller than our original idea.

The initial concept included several shops, baking mechanics, inventory management, and store customization. We reduced these features so the team could focus on completing one working dessert shop.

Playtesting also revealed that parts of the assembly process were not as intuitive as we expected. Some players assumed they needed to place a cupcake wrapper before adding the cake base because the wrapper appeared alongside the ingredients. We had included it as a decorative element but did not have enough time to build it into the recipe logic. Players also did not immediately understand that drinks needed to begin with a cup.

These moments showed that the visual design was communicating possible actions that the code did not actually support. Because we had not fully mapped each preparation process from the player's perspective, the game relied too much on assumptions and needed clearer instructions and visual cues.

A future version could improve the onboarding with:

A short interactive tutorial for the first order
Highlighted ingredients showing the next valid step
Clearer distinctions between decorative and usable objects
Visual examples of cupcake and drink assembly
Feedback explaining why an order cannot yet be completed
Baking states, inventory limits, and additional shops

The project taught me that even familiar activities, such as making a cupcake or pouring a drink, do not automatically translate into understandable game interactions. Every visible object creates an expectation, and the interface needs to match what players believe they can do.

While Chef's Plaza did not reach the scale we first imagined, it established a working gameplay loop and showed where more careful process mapping, instruction design, and user testing could make the experience feel clearer and more complete.