Are you a foodie? Are you a cook? Do you like to create recipes or simply put together a good cookbook? You can now live your dream of becoming a Master Chef and building your own classy restaurant with humble beginnings.
Rustle up Soups and Starters, Pastas and Pizzas, Cakes and Cookies and all the other delicious mouth watering cuisines from across the world and grow from an amateur cook to a culinary master while you lovingly cater to and delight all your customers!
Being a Top Chef is not just about running a kitchen. It's about having the right tools, getting the right mix of ingredients, using the freshest produce, to bring in flavor and that dash of spice and zing! Plate up exotic dishes, ramp up your restaurant tastefully with elegant decor and begin your tryst with the awesome world of food to realize your dream of becoming the Star Chef!
The idea behind Star Chef was to instill three primary feelings in the player. It's like a secret sauce - made from multiple ingredients. In this case, it was to tap into a player's love for food, dabble with the joy of creation, and garnish with pride of ownership.
Released for iOS on August 21st 2014, Star Chef is a lovingly crafted cooking and restaurant management game. We built this game and incidentally happened to crack the perfect blend of a freemium model, social scalability, and sheer cooking mastery - which quite honestly, great games aspire to have and often times don't.
From the very beginning of Star Chef, we believed in creating something great - we wanted to change the landscape dramatically and give our audience a game where they wouldn't just play, but associate their dream closely and immerse themselves in the gameplay.
As our Game Designer Carl says,
"People are driven to explore their passion one way or another. If they're destined for a ladle in one hand and a leaf in another, you can't stop it from happening."
This is especially true for our players. We have accountants, lawyers and doctors donning the Chef Hat and embracing the non-traditional approach in creating worldly cuisines.
Being developed for the entire world, Star Chef embraced culture and broke-free from the linear norms. We gave equal opportunities to our growing user base and we understood their pain-points - since they invest so much time and energy into preparing a single dish from cultivating crops, purchasing ingredients, to preparing additives for the final dish.
When we began designing the model for the gameplay, we knew good design is a practice, but strategic design isn't - and that's exactly the one we implemented. We didn't want to just paint a pretty picture, we wanted to create a powerful differentiator.
But getting to this point wasn't easy because putting out great work is about making tough decisions and reductions. Which means, the Matt, Nicole, Luca, and Bruce you would see today have undergone innumerable iterations. For all you know, Kekoa might have had a Samoan Afro which didn't make the cut - because we wouldn't want all the customers complaining of hair in their Shave Ice.
Our main challenge in perfecting the trade sequence was minimizing talk. We wanted tradeoffs to be a collaborative effort led visually over verbally. This was a mountain to scale. Because this game was made by people who love food for people who love food! We had to be careful with our values as we set out to bridge the gap between art and functionality. That's when the idea of a Community Truck apart from the Chef's Store came into being. A simple solution to a mammoth task. Collect various items from various players and deliver it round the clock in intervals.
Then we had to address the issue of not receiving the required ingredient from the Community Truck. "Why don't we have a delivery service for those immediate orders and ingredients, Shama said." And this was the spark that made Joe's Delivery possible!
Judging the creative progress of Star Chef and coming together of various elements we were confident we had a winner. We were in a state of mind where we felt equipped this game stood a real chance to capture players' imaginations both now and in the future. Mending a social construct through pool parties and serving up orders for pizza parties and bachelorettes, wouldn't you feel the real need of making your delivery a success?
We tried to pique interest and convert it to action: for example, there's Matt's Diner. Imagine this, if a picture says a thousand words, a prototype says a million. A fully functional Matt's Diner underwent an umpteen number of creative renditions because this was the benchmark. The first sight a player would see and recognize as a restaurant run by a Star Chef. They had the liberty to chase their dream and be a better Star Chef. Run a better restaurant. Serve many more orders. Throw a better pool party. And ultimately, be their version of Star Chef!
A game which started off being played by a few, has now been loved by millions! Over-the-years, Star Chef has also adapted much like our players. New features, new recipes, new juicy dishes. Our approach is longevity - keeping the game loved by all live for many years. This is why we have our Support constantly in cahoots with our Game Designers listening to our players and ensuring Star Chef is on a path of constant evolution.
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