Lost Recipes – An Educational VR Cooking Game

Lost recipes is an education VR cooking game where you are able to cook traditional recipes from three different places, while learning about the cultural relevance in a fun, easy to digest way. Although most cooking games are chaotic and silly, the tone of this game was intentionally set to be a nice and relaxed experience focusing on learning how to cook ancient recipes that don’t usually get the attention or care they deserve.

You can check out the website, including a recipe book at this link.

Great strides were made from the Project Director and Design Director to make this game as authentic as possible and through a long process, we were able to get authentic voice actors for all populations represented here.
Great care was taken to make sure the interactions felt good, and that the instructions made sense and players were able to follow along while having time to listen to narrative beats.

My contributions for this project were helping with the day to day, running scrum, following up on UI features within the team, gathering information for feature/team health and sending that over to the director group. As I was new to the studio and new to working with such a huge team, my beginning on this project was following up on simple stuff as I

continued to learn studio processes and becoming situated to my new environment. Towards the end of my time on the project, I helped run through bugs, speaking to the directors about risks I’ve worked through with the team and making sure things were on pace and syncing all information to the lead producer. It was also quite fun working on team celebration and team bonding events as well, my favorite was coordinating and cooking a recreation of one of our recipes in the studio, Tanghulu.

Art Production/Audio Production

One of my main responsibilities was helping the audio team work with the engineering team to implement all of the collision work going into the game. We tried not to get too heavy into physics but still have enough where objects made sense while playing and interacting with each other. The studio at the time used Wise for creating the sound systems within the game and hooking that in. But the infrastructure needed to be updated with some more best practices, trimmed and fit if you will. I tuned in with the audio dailies to ensure things were on track with our high level schedule, making sure to keep the director group and lead producer up to speed on all developments. If the audio team more tech support for certain updates, I made sure to create that action item and follow up on it with the appropriate parties. I also followed the UI effort for this game closely and worked through any flags needing to be raised for support up the chain of command.

QA

This was my first taste of QA at the studio . I spent my time working with the team during bug fixes and a good chunk of QA learning their process and making sure bugs were organized and assigned to the correct people. I also spent a good chunk of time playing the game and noting issues that I found and documenting them as well.
One of my favorite bugs was the infinite sparkle bug haha

Conclusion

I learned a lot about managing a large team, how to keep track of multiple features going on at the same time and working through pipelines that needed some iteration and more work to get to an ideal place. I’m thankful for the team that allowed me to learn and grow with them and I’m thankful for QA for showing me the ropes 🙂

Art Production/Audio Production

QA

Conclusion

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