Learn to Chef

A kitchen simulator to streamline learning how to cook and try new recipes without wasting ingredients

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Learn to Chef

This is an entry for the Hack the Northeast hackathon (June 5-7, 2020) for the following categories:

  • Best Gaming Hack
  • Most Viable Startup

Created by Erik Marsh, Daniel Enriquez, and Colin Rogers.

Summary (Gaming)

This project was created using Unreal Engine 4.25.1, an advanced 3D rendering and game development environment. Some assets were provided by the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and all others were manually created in the state-of-the-art 3D modeling software Blender and then imported to Unreal Engine. Due to time constraints, the features listed below were not added, but would be present in a final product.

  • Simple drag and drop control scheme for interacting with ingredients and combining them to create a food item.
  • More recipes.
  • Recipe search based on ingredients.
  • Custom ingredient substitutions to accommodate for food allergens and intolerances.

Summary (Startup)

This is an application designed to teach people how to cook in a risk-free environment. By risk-free, we mean that there is no risk of ruining ingredients by making mistakes. Additionally, the user does not need to pay for ingredients, which will be useful for those in a low-income situation. The target audience for this application is people in the age range of 18 to 25 with a desire to learn cooking skills that they have otherwise not learned, free of charge. This application is designed to be approachable and easy to use for beginners.

Business Plan Outline

In the business summary we decided to go into detail about how a viable startup could be formed off the development and maintenance of this simulation. Therefore, the business plan goes into detail about the marketing strategy, extra product details, and potential avenue for success if this were to be a startup that was made today. A break-even analysis was also made to analyze the revenue produced by this simulation to ensure the viability of the startup with accurate figures for users. The business plan mentions extra features that this team could not implement due to the limited time constraint. We ask the judges to look at the business plan as it details how a business can be made from this idea and shows the potential that a product such as this one has for growth.

Challenges faced

In such a limited timespace it was hard to implement the totality of the project, however, since we were able to implement the main components of the idea we feel as if we did an adequate job as we planned the viability of the startup on an actual idea and foundation that could be built. Another thing that was difficult was the business plan, we knew we had a viable startup and really wanted to go into detail at the same time because we felt the need that it was a very viable startup. Therefore, we took extra time to create a well detailed business plan and go above and beyond what was expected of us. This is a lot since we do not have any prior business knowledge yet still constructed a viable marketing strategy and business analysis. The other key challenge faced was working with our primary tools, Unreal Engine and Blender are notorious for being complex yet packed with a lot of power. We believe that in the end, we did a nice amount of work with an adequate demo to show the capabilities that a kitchen simulator could show, as it has the potential to mirror your own kitchen.

More information can be found in the Documents directory.

How to run

  • Install Unreal Engine
  • Open kitchen_sim.uproject with Unreal Engine with the Kitchen Assetts pack installed

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