CPSC 6160 / Kitchen Clash
Vineet Saraf
Game Description
Kitchen Clash is a fast-paced, strategy-based cooking game where players step into the high-pressure world of running a chaotic restaurant kitchen. Players take on the role of a chef managing incoming orders, balancing ingredients, and cooking dishes while keeping their 3 hearts alive. Every decision matters—burn a dish or miss an order, and you will pay, putting your kitchen at risk of total meltdown.
The objective of Kitchen Clash is to survive multiple nights in a high-stakes restaurant kitchen by completing orders efficiently and earning as much money as possible. Each night brings more tickets than the previous with more demanding customers and increasingly complex recipes, testing your ability to manage time and resources. You get three hearts, if you are late to cooking a dish you lose one. Eventually you will fail the game if you lose all of your hearts. At the end of each night you get a performance evaluation from the head chef. To keep your restaurant alive, you’ll need to stay calm under pressure, adapt to the chaos, and master the art of multitasking to impress customers and keep the head chef off your back.
Game Mechanics
To prepare a dish, you first purchase ingredients from the pantry, selecting the required items by entering their associated digit and pressing Enter. Once you have the ingredients, you equip them for cooking. Cooking involves holding down the M key or the key associated with the specific equipment, such as a grill or stove, and waiting for the timer to count down to 0. After cooking all the necessary components for a dish, you press A to assemble the cooked ingredients into a completed dish. Once the dish matches the customer’s order on the ticket, you press S to serve it.
Technical Description
Kitchen Clash was developed in Python using the Pygame library, a versatile framework for 2D game development. The game runs at 48 frames per second.
Built in Visual Studio Code, the development process utilized Python’s object-oriented capabilities to modularize the game's mechanics, such as the ingredient purchasing system, cooking timers, and the Stress Meter. Pygame’s rendering engine is used to create 2D environments, displaying ticket orders, food preparation areas, and Ramsay’s reactions in real time.
Despite the simplicity of Pygame as a framework, Kitchen Clash achieves a polished experience with efficient event handling and timing systems, enabling precise control over tasks like cooking and assembling dishes. The game’s technical implementation showcases Python’s flexibility and Pygame’s ability to deliver engaging gameplay, all while maintaining performance on various platforms.
Controls
The main game mechanics are grabbing food, cooking it, assembling it, and serving it.
Keyboard controls
Hold M - Cook food in microwave
Hit A - Assemble cooked ingredients.
Hit S - Serve an assembled Dish
Up/Down Arrow - Scroll up/down in menus
Hit a Number and Enter - To grab from inventory or pantry.�Shift + Left Arrow - Run left
Shift + Right Arrow - Run right
Esc - GAME OVER
To activate a ticket to begin working on it, click the blue square on it. Red squares close menus.
Game Limitations
Future Work
First, the game needs to flow better, from buying ingredients to cooking and serving, so it can feel smoother and more natural. More food dishes need to be added to give players more variety and keep things interesting, along with introducing more kitchen equipment that each has its own mechanics to add depth to the gameplay. These updates would help make the game more engaging.
Game objective
Game Screenshots
The game has very limited equipment, food items, and ingredients. Unfortunately that makes the game kinda basic and simple. In the future I would like the game to actually be more interesting and interactive.