Cooking Diary, from developer Mytona, is one of the most enduringly popular casual catering games of its generation. 

Now that it has turned 6 years old, Mytona is sharing the recipe for its success. And, yes, it’s literally a recipe. Bon appetit!

Ingredients

• 431 episodes
• 38 unique heroes
• 8,969 elements
• 905,481 guilds
• Events and contests
• A dash of humor
• Grandpa Grey’s secret ingredient (read to the end to find out)

Cooking instructions

Step 1: Prepare the lore

Prepare the plot, adding twists and humor to taste. Add in a generous helping of colorful characters to create the base for your lore. 

Next, divide the plot equally into districts and restaurants. Beginning with Grandpa Leonard Grey’s Burger Joint, gradually roll out the ingredients to more and more districts, from Colafornia to New Yogurt to Schnitzeldorf to Sushijima. 

There are 27 districts in total, each containing new challenges and stories set in 160 restaurants, bakeries, and diners. So preserve plenty of oven space.

Step 2: Add customization

Once your lore is ready, add 8,000 customization items, including 1,776 outfits (including 200 for pets) and 440 hairstyles. Then mix in 864 decorative items for the player’s home, and 5,600 for their restaurants. 

Step 3: Season with in-game events

Now take your base and fold in tasks and events. Use analytics to balance the piquancy of the game designers’ ideas, mold them into discrete events, and sprinkle generously with rewards.

Form the special events into layers, ensuring that they taste good individually and together. 

For an example of how to do this, one week in Cooking Diary featured a perfectly constructed tasting menu of nine different events  – including Culinary Experiments, Sugar Rush, and more. 

These events varied in flavor and style, but they all harmonized into a single cohesive feast. 

Step 4: Mixing in guilds

Food is for sharing, and that’s why Cooking Diary contains more than 905,000 different guilds, allowing fans to share their outfits and achievements. 

It is important to introduce guild events and tasks gradually to ensure that their flavors complement the dish. For example, tasks assigned to busy guilds have been shown to result in weaker returns than those assigned to guilds not currently taking part in guild events. 

Step 5: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

Cooking up a game is about innovation, and it’s vital that you’re not afraid to make mistakes while experimenting. Even Cooking Diary has created its share of unsuccessful dishes—though its developers have always learned from them.  

For example, in June 2019 the game introduced pets. Ordinary pets were free while rare pets cost Rubies. Hardly anybody bought them, so the team pivoted to a Path to Glory event, which allowed players to earn pets by completing tasks, increasing the game’s revenue by 42% in the process. 

Step 6: Stick the presentation

When serving a game, the first byte is with the eye. It’s not enough to simply create delicious flavors and deposit them on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, and AppGallery—you also need to know how to present these flavors.

That means advertising on social media, posting creatively, and riding trends. To see how it’s done, just check out Cooking Diary’s Instagram, Facebook, and X feeds, where you’ll find a banquet of contests and activities. 

Teaming up with another chef is a great idea too. For example, Cooking Diary has collaborated with Netflix’s Stranger Things in the past, bringing two sets of happy fans together. 

And just last month the game partnered up with YouTube through the Path to Glory event, through which you can win a free two-month subscription to YouTube Premium in the USA, UK, Korea, Japan, Canada, France, and Germany.

Presentation isn’t everything, of course, but to become the second highest ranked time-management game of all time, and win awards from IMGA and Webby, a developer needs to bring its A game.

Step 7: Mix it up

A recipe isn’t a dead, fixed thing. It keeps evolving as new ideas, techniques, and ingredients come along. That’s why Cooking Diary is always on the move, from the balancing to the events calendar. 

But one thing remains the same…

Step 8: Grandpa Grey’s secret ingredient

Which is soul. 

You can play Cooking Diary for yourself on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, and AppGallery.