Cooked Kitchen

"Cooked Kitchen" is a social cooking game where friends can get together, generate a random culinary challenge, rate each others' creations, and find out who chefs the best!

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Inspiration

As avid enjoyers of cooking (and food in general), we wanted to be able to experience the challenges of cooking competitions like Chopped and MasterChef from the comfort of our home. Since we aren't world-class chefs (yet), we decided to make our own application that would allow anyone to test their culinary skills alongside their friends for a fun hangout AND dinner activity.

What it Does

Cooked Kitchen is a web application that allows friends to join a centralized lobby that will randomly generate a broad culinary region alongside a fun, unique cooking challenge based on selected criteria for a friendly kitchen competition.

How we Built it

We wrote the backend with javascript whilst simultaneously designing the frontend UI with figma and hand-drawn icons, then integrated front and backend utilizing materialui. Finally, we generated an experimental link for our project domain using vercel.

Challenges

The first of a number of challeges we ran into was figma's limited features regarding UI design; since most advanced features were behind a paywall (and we're broke college students), we had to make do with what we had and either hand-draw designs or integrate certain aspects into the backend instead. Additionally, we were a little too ambitious and had to postpone implementation of an online service with picture uploads, and it was incredibly difficult to properly match the frontend UI with a functioning backend. Ultimately, we were unable to polish the site as well as we'd liked to, but are still proud of our overall product.

Accomplishments

100% hand-drawn background icons; effective player management system (players automatically rejoin lobbies after disconnections/internet disruptions); simple UI theme and family-friendly design

What we Learned

Testing frequently throughout the prototyping process is a great way to reduce errors and time spent debugging; we should anticipate obstacles and not be too ambitious with our initial idea

What's Next for Cooked Kitchen

Later on, we plan to utilize websockets and live video/image upload services to engineer public lobbies for players to find new friends/chefs to cook with globally. Additionally, as Cooked Kitchen continues to expand, we may need to implement a login system with 2fa to prevent botting and potential bad actors.

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