Animal Cafe

The cafe. Guests sit at the tables and the cooks work the kitchen up top.
Split up the stations and pass plates across the counter.
Guests don’t hand you an order. The customer's hot and starving, so cold soba it is.
Every station has a catch: the fridge freezes, the pot burns, the pan needs you holding E, and the oven takes forever.
Serve the wrong thing and you’ll hear about it.
Our engine handles the drawing, movement, and all 57 colliders in the room.
Built in Luau with Rojo. Codex did the code, Claude did the art.
Animal Cafe, a cozy co-op cooking game on Roblox.
117 test cases and 6,387 checks.
Four stations times four ingredients makes 16 dishes.
It’s on Roblox, so friends see you’re playing and can jump right in.
The server runs the kitchen and your screen predicts your movement, so it feels instant online.
Our first build was in Roblox 3D. Then we built our own 2D engine inside Roblox.

Inspiration

We spent most of the hackathon in the same room. Every few hours we would go out to grab food or just walk around. But, we would end up talking about the game the whole time and come back with new ideas. At some point we realized that’s kind of how we want to spend our 20s. Going on walks for no reason, hanging out with friends, letting the work happen along the way. The ideas came a lot easier when we weren’t sitting there trying to force them. So, we wanted the game to feel like that. Just a bunch of friends in a cozy kitchen trying to figure it out together.

What it does

Animal Cafe is a co-op cooking game in Roblox. We wanted something cozy to look at while being fun and a little hectic to play. Animal customers come in and sit down, then you and your friends read certain traits about them to understand what food item they want. Then, grab ingredients and cook at the right stations, and get the food out before customers run out of patience.

Why 2D on Roblox

Roblox is built for 3D worlds, so to get the cozy pixel-art look we wanted, we built our own 2D engine inside it. We think 2D on Roblox could be a real strategy. A 2D indie game usually has to find its own players and set up its own multiplayer servers. Meanwhile, Roblox already has the servers and the concept of added friends, so your friends can see what you're playing and join you. Cozy co-op games like ours are more fun with friends, so it made sense to build one where they already are.

How we built it

We wrote the game in Luau and used Rojo, so our code would live in normal files and Git instead of inside Roblox Studio. Since Roblox is built for 3D, we wrote our own 2D engine on top of it to get the pixel-art look we wanted. We spent most of our time on creative direction. Before anything got made, we wrote design docs with reference images, exact sizes, and colors. Codex turned those into most of the code, and Claude turned the art designs into SVG characters and icons.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was getting all of us to picture the same game. We had made an early proof of concept that got the idea running, which was a good start, but it didn't look like what we had in mind. We wanted a warm, cozy pixel-art game inside Roblox. After that we had to get the art pipeline working. We were working on getting Claude's SVGs to come back reliably in the right size and style.

What we learned

Since AI was doing a lot of the building, most of our time was spent on creative direction. That's hard to split up when nobody's sure who's doing what. Next time, we should start with one shared to-do list where each of us has our own jobs written out, so we know exactly how to divide the work. Additionally, typing something like "make it cozy pixel art" wasn't enough. So, we had to gather reference images and write down sizes and colors before the art started matching what we pictured.

What's next for Animal Cafe

Most likely to polish. The game probably won't feel perfect by the end of the weekend, and the feel is what we care about most. So, we plan on tuning the game more until we reach that goal we had intended. We could even iterate this game as much to publishing and marketing it on the Roblox Home Page!