Dishcovery

Dishcovery Overview

Inspiration

We were inspired by the idea that food is a living part of culture—something people engage with daily, yet often without awareness of its heritage. As globalization blurs culinary boundaries, we wanted to create a fun way for users—especially younger audiences—to connect with traditional dishes and the cultural stories behind them.

What it does

This game achieves the sustainability of different cultures through food. By allowing users to virtually cook traditional dishes from around the world, the game promotes hands-on engagement with intangible cultural heritage. Players can select a country on the world map, simulate ingredient choosing and cooking steps, then unlock cultural stories. Successfully made dishes are collected in a personal recipe book and light up the corresponding local cuisine. This game is designed to make learning about global food traditions both engaging and meaningful. It aims to increase users’ awareness of cultural diversity and sustainability in everyday choices, leveraging the power of food as a gateway to deeper cultural understanding.

How we built it

We created Dishcovery by following steps

Problem Define - Identify direction, problem, and target group
User Research - We did both first, and second hand research. We interviewed young people to understand their habits and interest in global cuisine. And did secondary research to support that we were in the right track.
Game Design: From concept -> style fiding -> game flow -> lo-fi -> hi-fi
Video Part: Script -> recorded prototype(video) -> edited video

Challenges we ran into

We actually thought of many solutions to determine what form of food can be spread/sustainable/cross-culturally, but we finally chose games.As we mentioned in one of our research reports, a big point in ensuring the sustainability of cultural communication is to ensure interactivity. We believe that the most interactive way of expression is through mobile games.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy that the solution we chose was to achieve it through the means of games. Because we rarely do this type of project, which not only considers many visual effects but also adds a lot of fun.

What we learned

Make sure your prototype is the same size as the sample to be displayed. There was a small incident happened in this project. We enlarged the original iPhone interface several times in Figma. When we checked it in the prototype display area, we found that the interface we made, the components inside did not match at all. So we spent some time to modify it to the same size as the original iPhone interface.