Introduction

I Just Want to Cook is the first game I made with Unity for a class. The assignment was to build a local multiplayer game. I designed the game mechanism drawing inspiration from the traditional hide-and-seek game we would play as children. This game has two main characters: hunter and rabbit. The hunter needs to catch the rabbit, and the rabbit needs to look at a recipe to find ingredients and take them home to cook.

Local Multiple Players

The mechanism for this game was not as simple as I had anticipated. Obviously, hide and seek cannot be played within the local multiple-player mechanism, because the screen is divided between two players, and they can easily see each other’s screens. To make the mechanism work, I designed the map like a maze. This way, even if a player can see the opponent’s screen, there is no way to know the opponent’s location for certain.

Third Person Camera

Due to limited keyboard space, two players can use only four arrow keys to move in I Just Want to Cook. For instance, one player uses W, A, S, and D to move forward, backward, left, and right. However, the players cannot control the camera angle, so I need to make the camera rotate automatically. To attain this goal, I referred to games like Zelda and GTA, and wrote a camera script that automatically rotates according to the player’s forward direction.

World Space UI

I tried making changes to the UI system. In the main game menu, I put all the UI in a 3D scene and switched between different UIs, making the camera point toward the corresponding place, which made the UI more dynamic, as if the player is traveling through the scene.