Undercooked - Low Cost Team Building Game

Inspiration

Overcooked is one of the best co-op games ever made, and it's still just a screen. Everyone crowds around a TV, mashes buttons, and yells at pixels. We wanted the yelling to be about a real frying pan.

It also made us think about team building. The best team-building activities force people to communicate, split up work, and cover for each other under pressure, but the good ones tend to be expensive, need a venue, or need special equipment. Overcooked already teaches all of that, so we asked: what if it were physical, and cheap enough for any club, class, or team event to run?

What it does

Undercooked is Overcooked rebuilt with real, physical cooking stations. Players chop on a real cutting board (a limit switch counts the presses), waggle a joystick to fry in a pan, scrub a sink, and slide food onto plates. Food is a cheap RFID tag, and a laptop runs the game, spawns orders, and keeps score on a live browser scoreboard that any phone or laptop on the Wi-Fi can open.

Nobody can finish an order alone. Players have to call out orders, hand off ingredients, and cover for each other before the clock runs out.

It costs about $130 to build a full 8-station kitchen. Each station is a roughly $6 ESP32 board, a $2 RFID reader, a status LED strip, and a few dollars of wiring. Ingredients are 15-cent RFID tags. Add a laptop you already own and there's no console, big screen, or venue to book.

It's easy to set up. Pair each station with a single touch of a tag, plug in the bridge, and open the scoreboard. Levels, recipes, and scoring live in one config file, so new levels don't need code changes.

How we built it

Stations: an ESP32 with an MFRC522 RFID reader, WS2812B LEDs, and one input each (limit switch or joystick), written in C++ with PlatformIO. Stations report events and draw whatever they're told.
Bridge: a single ESP32 that relays between the stations (over ESP-NOW) and the laptop (over USB serial), and doubles as the calibration reader.
Game server: Python. A pure game engine owns all game state, so a reset is one function call and progress survives picking food up and putting it down on a different station.
Scoreboard: a FastAPI websocket pushes the full game state ten times a second to a plain JavaScript page with no build step.

Challenges we ran into

Tiny packets, unreliable radios. ESP-NOW packets max out at 32 bytes, so we built our own typed protocol with acks, retries, and de-duplication so a lost ack never runs a handler twice.
Knowing when a tag has left. The RFID reader can't say "the tag is gone", only "no answer", so we tuned polling and miss-counting to detect removal reliably.
Real hardware quirks. Joysticks had to run off 3.3V on ADC1 pins, because ADC2 stops working when Wi-Fi is on, and opening the serial port reboots the bridge.
Keeping two languages in sync. The firmware is C++ and the server is Python, so a test parses the C++ header and fails the build if the two protocols drift.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We tested everything on real hardware, and every station works.
The whole game can run with zero boards plugged in, thanks to a simulated bridge that speaks the real protocol, backed by 100+ Python tests and native C++ unit tests.
A full kitchen for around $130 that anyone can build.

What we learned

Keep the hardware dumb. Putting all game state on the laptop and letting stations only report events and draw what they're told made the system far easier to debug, test, and reset.
Physical games are unforgiving. Wiring, timing, and radio range all show up in gameplay in a way they never do in software, so testing on real hardware early matters.
Test the seams. Most of our bugs lived where two pieces met (C++ and Python, radio and serial), so tests that guard those boundaries paid off the most.
Cheap parts go a long way. A few dollars of ESP32s, RFID readers, and tags is enough to build something people actually want to play together.

What's next for Undercooked

More levels: new kitchens, bigger orders, and tougher recipes.
Better physical stations: 3D-printed housings for the cutting board, pan, pot, and sink instead of loose breadboards, while keeping costs low.
More station types: a real recipe for the sink, new appliances, and plate contents shown on LEDs.
Bigger teams: more players and a full table-sized kitchen for team events.