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Title Screen
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Upload Pantry Photos
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List of Food Uploaded
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List of Dishes to Create
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Choose a Difficulty
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Minigames to Complete
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Final Score
Inspiration
Cooking can sometimes feel daunting when you're staring at a pantry full of random ingredients and wondering what to make. We wanted to bring back the fun and nostalgia of classic cooking video games like Cooking Mama, but with a modern twist. Cooking with Fam was born from the idea of turning everyday meal prep into an interactive gaming adventure, encouraging people to cook with whatever ingredients they already have at home.
What it does
Cooking with Fam is a Cooking Mama-inspired game that transforms your real-life pantry into a virtual culinary challenge:
Pantry Scanning: Take a photo of your pantry, and the game automatically analyzes your available ingredients.
Recipe Generation: Based on your scanned ingredients, the game formulates a customized recipe.
Customizable Difficulty & Challenges: Choose your preferred difficulty level where each offers unique cooking challenges to tackle during gameplay.
Interactive Gameplay: Pick your character and step into the virtual kitchen to create your recipe step-by-step.
How we built it
We built Cooking with Fam by integrating computer vision, dynamic recipe generation, and interactive game mechanics:
Frontend / Game Interface: Designed an intuitive interface where users select their avatars, complete cooking mini-games, and view live scoring.
Pantry Analysis & Recipe Engine: Integrated image processing to detect pantry items from uploaded photos and feed them into a prompt/algorithm to generate tailored recipes according to chosen difficulty levels.
Game Logic & Dynamic Events:Implemented event triggers that spawn angry chef interruptions when mistakes are made and calculate final scores based on time, accuracy, and difficulty settings.
Challenges we ran into
Accurate Ingredient Detection: Training or prompting computer vision to reliably identify a wide variety of packaged goods and fresh items from a single pantry photo.
Balancing Gameplay & Realism: Making the in-game cooking steps responsive and entertaining while maintaining realistic recipe steps generated from user ingredients.
Handling Dynamic Interruptions: Seamlessly triggering angry chef appearances during gameplay errors without causing frame drops or breaking game state flow.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Successfully connecting real-world physical ingredients (via photo upload) into generated interactive gameplay.
Creating an entertaining dynamic difficulty system with custom challenges and having a well designed UI with drawn assets.
Delivering a nostalgic, gamified cooking experience that promotes reducing food waste by cooking with existing pantry items.
What we learned
How to effectively bridge computer vision/AI generation with real-time game state management.
The importance of responsive game design and UI feedback to keep mini-games engaging and clear.
Strategies for fine-tuning prompt engineering/recipe logic to handle unpredictable ingredient combinations.
What's next for Cooking with Fam
Expanded Character Cast: Adding more playable avatars with unique passive perks or special kitchen abilities.
Multiplayer / Co-Op Mode: Allowing friends or family members to cook together collaboratively or compete head-to-head in real time.
Social Sharing & Leaderboards: Enabling players to showcase their completed dishes and top scores on global leaderboards.
Dietary & Preference Filters: Incorporating custom filters (e.g., vegan, gluten-free, allergy alerts) directly into the pantry scan pipeline.
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