Cooking Diary is six years old, and developer MYTONIA is ready to share the recipe for its megahit time-management game.
If you’re a developer yourself, you might just find a few nuggets of wisdom for your own recipes. And if you’re merely a humble player, you might enjoy learning what goes into your favorite casual games.
Enjoy!
Ingredients
- 431 story episodes
- 38 heroe characters
- 8,969 elements
- 905,481 guilds
- A generous portion of events of contests
- A soupcon of humor
- Grandpa Grey’s secret ingredient
Cooking Instructions
First step: Make the Lore
Start by preparing the plot, remembering to include plenty of humor and twists. Add a vast number of colorful characters, and the plot is ready.
Segment the plot into restaurants and districts, making sure to start with the Burger Joint, which is owned by your grandfather, Leonard. Gradually layer this with more districts, such as Colafornia, Schnitzeldorf, and Sushijima.
There are 160 different restaurants, diners, and bakeries in Cooking Diary, distributed across 27 districts—so invite plenty of guests.
Step 2: Customize
Place your lore on the counter and add up to 8,000 items, including 1,776 outfits, 88 sets of facial features, and 440 hairstyles. Follow these with over 6,500 different decorative items for players’ homes and restaurants.
Depending on your dietary preferences, you can also add pets, along with 200 items of clothing to customize them with.
Step 3: In-game events
At this point, it’s time to fortify your mix with tasks and events. It’s vitally important to use the sharpest possible analytics tool here, complementing the creativity of the game design concepts with precision of high quality data.
The trick with events, apart from seasoning generously with rewards, is to create different but complementary layers, so that each layer tastes as good individually as it does in concert with the ones around it.
See August for an example. During the second week of that month, Cooking Diary included an impressive nine different courses, from Culinary Experiments to Sugar Rush. They were as enjoyable in isolation as they were together.
Step 4: Guilds
There are more than 905,000 guilds in Cooking Diary. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. But it’s also a lot of outfits to show off, achievements to share, and fun to have.
When adding guild events and tasks to your recipe, make sure you introduce them gradually and combine them thoroughly.
A poorly thought-out event—for example, one that takes place at the same time as other time-consuming events—will attract fewer guests than a well-timed one.
Step 5: Learn from Your Mistakes
The key to creating a great recipe is not avoiding mistakes, but learning from them—and a recipe that has never gone wrong simply isn’t ambitious enough.
The team behind Cooking Diary have made their own mistakes, such as their botched introduction of pets to the game in 2019. At first, normal pets were free and rare ones cost Rubies, but this failed to generate interest in the rarer specimens.
Those developers quickly fixed the problem by making pets unlockable through the Path to Glory event, resulting in a 42% revenue increase and a lot more happy customers.
Step 6: Presentation
The casual games market is an extensive buffet, spanning the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, and AppGallery.
Even with the best-tasting games, you need to do something special to stand out among this spread, which means making good use of social media, being creative in your messaging, running contests, holding activities, and keeping an ear to the ground for trends.
To see a slick social media strategy in action, take a look at Cooking Diary on Instagram, Facebook, and X.
Collaborations are smart too. That’s why Cooking Diary joined forces with Netflix blockbuster Stranger Things on a huge in-game event, and partnered with YouTube on the Path to Glory event.
Netflix and YouTube are the alpha dogs of the streaming world, which means Cooking Diary is the alpha dog of the casual time-management world—and it has the downloads and awards to prove it.
Step 7: Keep Innovating
Getting to the top is one thing. Staying there is another. The reason Cooking Diary has been riding high for the last six years is that it keeps adding new ingredients, experimenting with presentation, and trying new techniques.
From event calendar tweaks to the balancing of the time-management gameplay, Cooking Diary is different from one day to the next, though its secret ingredient always remains the same.
Step 8: Use Grandpa Grey’s secret ingredient
What is that ingredient? It’s soul, of course. You can’t make a great game unless you genuinely love what you do.
Check out Cooking Diary for yourself on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, and AppGallery.