Careful Café

Main Menu Screen
Kitchen with Manager Dialogue
EpiPen Minigame
Pantry Minigame
Pantry Minigame
Mixing Minigame
Baking Minigame
Pantry Minigame
Kitchen Scene
Washing Minigame

Inspiration 🐾

This project was inspired by the experiences of people we know who live with food allergies. Through conversations with them, we gained insight into the challenges they face when dining out, such as having to carefully communicate their dietary restrictions to avoid severe reactions. These discussions opened our eyes to the realities of living with allergies and motivated us to create a game that raises awareness in a fun, interactive, and educational way.

Additionally, from our own experiences in the food industry, we noticed a significant lack of training on proper allergen safety. When customers asked whether certain foods were allergy-safe, we were not taught the correct precautions to take. To address this gap, Careful Café features a manager character who serves as the knowledgeable guide we wish had been available to us. This character helps both food service workers and individuals learn how to accommodate allergies and implement best practices for food safety. By integrating these lessons into gameplay, we hope to make allergy awareness more accessible and engaging for everyone.

What it does 🥐

Careful Café is a 2D game where players step into the role of a café worker, learning how to prepare food while accommodating dietary restrictions. Through engaging mini-games and interactive dialogue, players gain a deeper understanding of food allergies and the importance of proper communication in food service. Through interactive mini-games and dialogue, players develop a deeper understanding of food allergies, hygiene, and safety in food service.

One of the most impactful features of the game is an interactive lesson on how to properly use an EpiPen - a skill that, like the Heimlich maneuver, is simple to learn yet life-saving in emergencies. Before working on this game, many of us didn’t know how to use one, and we realized how essential this knowledge is.

By normalizing hygienic practices, fostering empathy for those with allergies, and providing clear, practical lessons on EpiPen use, including when and where to inject, it becomes more than just a game. We believe Careful Café has real-world value, showing that video games aren’t just for storytelling and entertainment; they can also be powerful tools for education and social awareness.

How we built it 😸

We developed the game using the Unity Engine, with all gameplay logic written in C#. The visual assets were personally designed and handcrafted using Procreate and Clip Studio Paint, bringing a unique and polished art style to the game. We also designed the custom sound track using BeepBox.

Challenges we ran into 🥐

One of our biggest challenges was implementing the core game logic and ensuring all mechanics functioned smoothly. We dealt with sleep deprivation and creating an extremely ambitious amount of assets to the point where we could not implement everything we had hoped for the vision of this game. Additionally, merging our individual contributions into a single branch proved to be tricky, requiring careful collaboration and version control management. These being said, we are immensely proud of how far Careful Café has come!

Accomplishments that we're proud of 💗

We’re proud to have created an educational game that makes learning about food allergies both engaging and accessible! We are immensely proud of all the design work when it came to creating all the sprites, individual characters, dialogue boxes, foods, and animations. We also wrote a ton of informational dialogue boxes, created a variety of unique customers with allergies that correspond to the recipe, and designed a sound track. We are proud of the 4 minigames we incorporated into the game, which included multiple mechanics such as animation, state machines, dragging and dropping, and collision detection. These offered many unique technical aspects of the game that make it fun to play and allowed for lots of interaction and sprite design. We are also proud of being able to save data in the main scene to access the unique allergies in other mini-games.

What we learned 🐾

Throughout this process, we learned the importance of clear communication when developing a game. Aligning on mechanics, structure, and responsibilities early on helped us work more efficiently as a team. Some of our team was completely new to the Unity engine, starting from the very basics to implementing our own scenes and learning so much along the way. From the ground up we were able to implement State machines and complex animations

What's next for Careful Café 💗

We plan to expand Careful Café by adding more features and mini-games that cover a wider range of allergies and highlight how cafés can safely accommodate them. Our goal is to make this game an even more informative and valuable experience for players. Additionally, we’d love to incorporate more personal stories, as emphasizing empathy is key to our mission. By featuring real user-submitted experiences, including flashbacks of times they faced exclusion from activities or restaurants due to their allergies, we hope to educate our community and foster greater understanding.