Runtime: 10 minutes. There are three levels, each lasts 3 minutes.

There is a song on the title screen, so stay awhile and listen!

On an island so small it did not have a name, my great-grandfather, Datuk Ismail, was visited by a monster from the sea...

Monster Kitchen Island
Typing game meets cooking game!

Manage a busy kitchen with monsters as your customers. (Anybody that has worked in the restaurant business knows customers are monsters anyway.) Control robots with your keyboard to serve monsters from the safety of your home!

Controls

  • Keyboard - Control robots/Seat customers/Serve customers
  • Backspace - Delete word
  • ESC - Open/Close recipe reference
  • Tab - Switch between beach and kitchen
  • Shift - Switch between robots
  • Space - Advance dialogue

Highscores
Level 1

Riuku 85

Happysquared 80

Dosto 80

Hokori 75

Ivanbje 45

Level 2

Riuku 75

Dosto 70

Hokori 60

Happysquared 57

Ivanbje 50

Level 3

Happysquared 60

Dosto 55

tehwave 50

Ivanbje 45

Hokori 45

How to Play (check out the video tutorial or text)

Commanding the robots
example1

Each little box displays an action (e.g. 'chop') assigned to a random word (e.g. 'QUEEN'). Type the word in the black box to execute the action.

E.g. Type "irony" to command a robot to pick up a fish.

The commands you see change depending the active robot.

typingtest

Click "Shift" to switch between robots. You could get more tasks done that way.

Switching between cooking and serving
switch

Switch between making dishes and serving customers. Click "Tab" to switch between the kitchen and seating area to fulfill your tasks!

Serving Guide

The first thing you want to do is start seating customers! When a customer is seated, they will tell you what food they want to order.

customerline

1) Seat monsters by typing in the individual letters that appear on the beach tables.

2) When a monster is seated, an order appears! This is the order you should make in the kitchen to serve the monster.

3) When an order has been completed in the kitchen, it will appear in the beach area orderappear

4) Serve a monster: Type the letter assigned to a dish to select it, then type a table's letter in order to send it to that table. Careful! If you send the wrong dish to the wrong table, the monster will NOT be happy.

Kitchen Guide

You prepare the dishes in the kitchen!

assemble

Dishes are assembled on the bottom table. When the right ingredients are placed on a serving table, it turns into a finished dish.

chopchop Some ingredients require preparation, e.g. chopping, boiling, ice-creaming.

trash

If you prepare an ingredient wrongly, you end up with garbage. You can put anything in the trash can to get rid of it.

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  • Riuku
    Lv. 19

    Love it! It's got tons of personality, just like all your previous games. The voice acting and the song with actual singing makes all the difference in giving the game character and shows that it was made by real people.

    I really like how the music is written to fix the fixed time limit. You can intuitively tell how much time is left just by listening to the music. You can tell even on the first playthrough because the intensity of the music ramps up towards the end.

    The game instructions are a lot to take in at first, that's for sure! But the game is actually simple after all and it all makes sense, so I'm not sure how to approach it differently than how you've already done it. Props for taking the time to make two versions of the tutorial (text and video) so people can pick whichever they like! The video was more useful to me personally, at least as the very first introduction.

    I hear that you're planning on making a post jam version, so I've passed some more detailed feedback your way in DM! I hope it's useful. I'll be looking forward to the post jam version for sure.

    Jam Royale
    Submitted

    Jam Royale

  • illdie
    Lv. 12

    This game is incredible! The learning curve feels really steep, but it's such a great idea with tons of polish, and adorable art!

  • goblin
    Lv. 2

    One of the most polished jam games I've ever played! Super nice art, the music is lovely (especially the menu music) and the gameplay is fun! I don't really play typing games or cooking games so I was terrible at it but I still had a blast playing it. Excellent work!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback! We'll definitely try to put a proper tutorial and difficulty curve in the post jam. Think it can be quite overwhelming otherwise! Glad you had fun!

  • Argot Bertha
    Lv. 2

    Great presentation, lots of charm, and a unique scenario. Easily polished enough already to straight be a commercial title. The mechanic is also one I haven't seen before.

    On the gameplay side, probably due to the fact I'm not that familiar with cooking games, and only slightly more with typing games (Typing Of The Dead is about it), I found it pretty hard to do what I needed to within the 3 minutes, and the first attempt was chaos. The second attempt was a bit more comprehensible, but it was still a struggle to get everything done within 3 minutes.

    If there was a beat-by-beat tutorial that gradually introduces the different elements over a number of levels for the benefit of noobs like myself (skippable for the more initiated, obv), instead of an info dump before gameplay is reached, that would be great. In a sense, I doubyt I'm telling you anything you weren't aware of anyway, as I'm sure the info dump just a result of only having 48 hrs to make it. My game just had a screen of info about controls and mechanics on the title screen, and I guess I'm lucky my game was a lot simpler than this.

    there was also what I felt was an odd difference in pace between the main course and dessert parts. Whereas with the main course, the pace was such that you were constantly rushing to do tasks and switching between robots, whereas with dessert, the ice cream machines were so slow that one robot would catch up with the other and have to wait. The latter is a legitimate gameplay variation, as it makes for a different kind of tension, but one I feel would be better introduced after a number of increasingly frantic levels have established the momentum of the chaotic multitasking approach. As it is, I found waiting aspect a bit of a jolt in pace when I was trying to get used to the previous level's style.

    There really is tons going for this. If you can nail the difficulty curve, I think it would do damn well.

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the detailed feedback!

      Yeah, most typing games, including Typing of the Dead, have typing mechanics that focus on "destroying enemies". When you type a word, an enemy gets destroyed. So wanted to try something where the typing was more a control mechanic instead.

      You're totally right it's a really overwhelming game. Due to the 48 hours, we just weren't able to implement a proper tutorial and deal with level scaling better. We wanted specific levels to have specific recipes but found it difficult to remove recipes with the amount of time we had left. So our game just keeps building more recipes which made it overwhelming...

      Yeah there was meant to be a difference in pace when it comes to dessert. Like you can leave the ice cream machine running and go do other tasks as the ice cream machine takes awhile to finish up. So maybe an indicator that the ice cream machine runs whether you are near it or not.

      Definitely a lot of tweaks to be made to balance it out though we'll deal with in post jam!

      Thanks again for the detailed feedback and playing our game!

  • Slow M
    Lv. 1

    Good idea, sometimes if you start typing during a transition though it doesn't register the keys. a little annoying but otherwise a fun game.

    There's a little too much going on, and has some learning curve though, but otherwise the game is quite polished.

    • Ivanbje
      Patron
      Ivanbje Developer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thank you for the feedback.

      That's a good point we'll have to fix the writing while it's transitioning for the post-jam.

      The learning curve is pretty steep but hopefully you still liked it :D

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback! Definitely things we are taking into consideration for the post jam.

  • Fachewachewa
    Patron

    (sorry I lost the text, I'll go to the point)
    Game: pretty much perfect. Wish I could skip the dialogs when replaying. Shift / Tab were a little confusing.
    Me: extremely bad. Couldn't get to 40 points.
    The menu song: love it.

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback!

      I had issues with losing the text too. Ended up just using notepad and pasting it in after it happened a few times :')

      But thanks for the very kind feedback. Really appreciate it. And yeah will prob rework some controls in the postjam version. I love the menu song too. Our composer did a really nice job with it. She really wanted to make a song for a game jam so happy got to do it this time round.

    • Megan
      Lv. 12
      Megan Composer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Very glad you liked the song! Agree with all your criticisms, we're changing those in the postjam

  • Kwis
    Lv. 67

    I love typing games! I can type rather fast despite using only 2 fingers and it often makes typing games fun!

    The game has so much content! I really didn't expect the singing! All feels appropriate and gives the game a real nice charm! I know you got 6 people on board but it's still impressive to have added this much in 48 hours!

    The game did feel a bit overwhelming, I guess it would take several tries to really get it going. Also is there a way to discard dishes we accidentally finished? A few times I added wrong ingredients on the plate, but was unable to remove any of it, so it meant one plate I couldn't use. I also wonder why I can't access previous recipes; I know they're easy to remember but it feels comforting to be able to check! There was a lot of recipes on level 3! ...but I only was asked for the coconut cocktail and mostly had to do sorbet. I mean I just assume it was luck!

    Didn't score very highly though cause there is a lot to look at! i kinda wish we had a more simple, level 1 (or maybe a tutorial level); having to read a whole explaination, even if very clear, you would forget a bunch of it; I would have prefered to be able to do it with gameplay one step at a time (explaination, doing a step, another explaination, another step, etc), but I can get it can be difficult to set up when time is a precious ressource!

    In any case the game felt very complete and polished, it was really nice to play!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Yay! Happy to find someone else who loves typing games :D That's crazy you can type quickly with just 2 fingers. Pretty impressive.

      My sister really wanted to do a song for a game jam. Finally got the chance to do it so we're very happy it made it in the game.

      Agree the game is too overwhelming. We really didn't have time to add in a tutorial... 30 minutes to submission, we still had 0 dialogue inside the game. So I feel the large wall of text was our way of trying to fit in a tutorial... And yeah hoping to reduce some RNG stuff too with the food you have to make. We wanted each level to have specific recipes so you wouldn't need to remember the past recipes. Unfortunately.... removing stuff from levels is harder than putting it in. So hope to get that part done post jam and hope that will clear up the difficulty in recipe referencing.

      And adding a proper simple tutorial level as well.

      Thanks for the detailed feedback and playing our game!

      • Kwis
        Lv. 67

        I forgot, but I wanted to suggest to have specific words for specific actions for example, the fish one would have fish-related text, while ice cream machine, ice cream ones etc.. I thought it's kinda what the game was doing when I had "ice" (or icy, something like that) for the ice cream machine

        It would help players expect what to write and what is written might help figuring out quicker what place you're typing for

  • dreamcastgh0st
    Lv. 2

    Okay, I really like the world of this! The intro cutscene really does have the same energy as an old wives tale, and connects great to the game and premise it has set up. Definitely a unique gameplay style too-- would not expect to see a resteraunt game combined with a typing game. It does get a little repetitive-- I imagine this becomes less of an issue to a player strategically focused on getting a good score, but for a first-time player like me, it was a noticable issue. The problems though are MORE than made up for with the great theme, art, and very unique gameplay idea! This is certainly a memorable one for me, great job!

    • Ivanbje
      Patron
      Ivanbje Developer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks! We are very happy with how everything turned out regarding the story and vibe of the game. The nature of typing does get a bit repetitive. We know typing games aren't for everyone, even within the team, not everyone is a fan of them. We did like the idea and exploring different avenues is always fun, trying to bring fun to different people, with different tastes.
      Very glad you liked the game overall and thank you for your kind words 😃

  • baku
    Patron

    I love this game's vibe. The art and sound is great, and the story was so well thought out. Thematically it's perfect. I'm extremely sad that I don't enjoy playing it much :( Maybe I'm bad at multi-tasking or something, but I feel like I immediately get overwhelmed and stressed out lol. I wish this was my type of game because everything else about it is so well done.

    Also I was like holy shit how did you do all this in 48 hours, and then I noticed you've got 6 people in your team this time!! Crazy.

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback! Really happy with the vibe and aesthetic we ended up coming up with during the jam :D

      I'm kinda biased towards typing games as I personally love playing them so a bit surprised at how niche it seems. But I also feel we could have done the difficulty scaling better and holding people's hands a little more to introduce the concept better. As it's not just a typing game, but also a management one and I can totally see people feeling overwhelmed by the amount of monsters.

      We actually had to bring nyveon in halfway through the jam because we realised we overscoped and really needed extra help, haha.

      Thanks again for playing and the feedback!

  • Sandro Magliozzi
    Lv. 1

    snappy and fun to play. Even the simple act of typing felt satisfying with the sound effects and visuals. Simple but elegant in that sense. Had a bit of trouble running the game but once I got it running I found myself cursing as I tried to beat my previous score. I think a game that entices you to get better is a sign of great game design. Been following these devs for a while now and I'm excited to see more!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for playing and the feedback!

      It was a big deal for me to put the sound effect and visuals in for the words. We barely finished that part on time but I'm glad it got in otherwise I think it'd have been even more confusing than it is now. Glad we managed to sneak that feature in!

      Thanks again for playing our game :D

  • Tydecon Games
    Patron

    A typing game was not something I was expecting at all from this jam and not something I'm usually up for playing - but WOW, this is AMAZING! The story telling, the song to go with, it's all really fantastic. I think this could easily be packaged up and sold to schools as a typing tutor game that would actually encourage people to type. I felt switching between tab, esc and shift a little tricky to begin with and it was a lot to take in on my first time around, it's definitely something you can come back to and practice over and over, hence its appeal as an educational game, and for the amount of content, in just two days, it's really incredible! You've got a solid entry here, I'm truly blown away! Great job!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      I learned from this jam a surprising amount of people aren't into typing games haha. I'm glad you still found enjoyment from it! (I play so many typing games so definitely biased on the genre)

      Thanks for playing and the feedback. I really enjoyed watching your playthrough video. Super nicely edited :D

      I think something about most typing games is that it's just about the typing and you don't have to think about what you're typing so much. Hence the addition of the cooking game to give a typing game more of a "game" feel than just "gotta type everything as fast as I can". Which can definitely feel more like an exercise. So many more encouraging to play.

      Definitely think the controls could use a rework or a slower learning curve to get used to them though!

      Thanks again for playing and the playthrough video :D

  • Kyon
    Lv. 25

    What a crazy beautiful intro! The art, the story, the music! Loved it so much and got me immersed instantly! The game itself was also really nice, once I got the hang of it it felt pretty natural to use typing to control everything. Great job on visual feedback/gamefeel!

    The fact that you cannot move your robot to a position another robot is already on did put me in some tough spots. The first days I couldn't figure out how to combine ingredients and on day 1 I didn't even make a single dish (the day was still a great succes though hahah)

    I did a lot better on my 2nd playthrough and I spotted a lot of funny word-easter eggs. I even spotted "Bonte"!

    The amount of controls felt a bit overwhelming; Escape, Shift, Tab, + all the typing. I think some of it could've been either visible all the time, or be automated in a way? Idk. It didn't bother me too much though, but I think most of the difficulty for me was remembering and coordinating all the tabbing and shifting between characters instead of typing the words correctly and quick. But maybe that was the whole idea.

    Loved how there was dialogue between every day, can't wait for a post jam version haha to see how this story continues. I also LOVED that the song came back at the end, listened to it for atleast 5 times hahah so good. Dry 4th wall lyrics about the gameplay are always a big plus for me of course. :)

    I.S.Land
    Submitted

    I.S.Land

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for playing our game and the feedback! We're very happy with how the intro came about. When the theme was announed we were wondering about what to do with the story and just really liked when ivan came up with - needing to cook food to stop sea monsters from eating you. So we ran with that and built it up over the course of the jam.

      Post-jam, we really really want to make it so you can move your robot onto the position of another robot. Definitely a HUGE thing we did not have time to implement and we wasted several hours to get the pathfinding to work as well.

      Our word list was completely human generated too. Think it was really calming that during the hectic development time we could just open the doc and add a few words in. So it was a nice calming activity to do as well.

      I do think the controls need a rework... maybe a better tutorial could help out but we also had unused sprites that were meant to show the controls. No time to put them in...

      My sister actually wanted to reach out to you about the song to ask if you could help with some guitar stuff but we decided not to as you're probably busy with your own entry so she went with a ukulele. Think it turned out nicely though!

    • Megan
      Lv. 12
      Megan Composer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      So glad you liked the song and the music! It was fun finally getting to do a song, though I should finally get a proper mic one of the these days...

  • Henry Haak
    Lv. 41

    The presentation of this game is really something for a game jam, so great job on that! The song on the main menu is quite cute, and the story elements really bring the whole game together.

    I really like the concept of the game, but the controls didn't feel very intuitive to me. I found myself repeatedly switching to the wrong robot, or pressing tab to look at the front when I didn't want to.

    Still, I enjoyed my time with it, and I think you've made a great game, aesthetically. I can't wait to see more next time.

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for playing our game and the feedback!

      We're very proud of the presentation and the direction the mood ended up going in :D Glad you enjoyed it!

      Yeah I think we might want to look at the controls again. I think people tend to view tab as a way to switch between robots which I thought was pretty interesting. We might experiment with using space as well instead of tab and shift.

      Glad you enjoyed your time with it! And yeah we'll definitely have a post jam of this one up.

  • CrashB1111
    Lv. 17

    Wow, amazing game! Incredible work for such a small amount of time!

  • OoTrillionoO
    Lv. 2

    As someone bad at typing games and with no experience with diner-type games, I knew the gameplay would be a bit rough for me. But, I think that that perspective may have helped me notice what I could find frustrating.

    The presentation, pretty sick. Saw the sea monster image and right off the bat was into it, and the story leading into the gameplay worked really well. The music was well-fitting, and the jingle during the menu was super cute. Controls acted as they should, and I couldn't find any bugs.

    As an audience, I fall into a group of people who probably need their hand held for a game like this. The tutorial was frankly daunting and overwhelming. But, the gameplay loop wasn't particularly hard to get a grasp on. I blanked out during the tutorial and went on to serve two dishes of chopped limes before quickly learning what the game wanted from me. For me the tutorial felt like it detracted from the experience. What I immediately can think of to aid it would be meaningful player actions following instructions so that the player can internalize what it is saying. But, that'd probably be too time intensive for a 48 hour jam. There's probably a quicker solution.

    During the first level, I found that my pace was slow enough that I could just get both robots to work on sashimi. Which felt fine at the time, it was nice to be able to develop a weird strategy. The problem I had was when I hit level 2 I couldn't look up how to make the other level 1 dish. Something like a page-flipping mechanic for the recipe book would very likely help, and if this was something expanded upon, I feel that it would be a necessity for playing this over the course of multiple days.

    Mmm, that's all I can think of. If expanded upon, difficulty options to adjust word length seem like they'd be a nice plus.

    But yeah it was still a fun game, and despite not being a typing game player, I enjoyed it and appreciated it.

    Thanks for sharing you work~

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for giving our game a shot even though it is a typing/diner game. And for the detailed feedback!

      Glad you enjoyed the presentation, we were very happy with how our silly ideas came together :D

      You are definitely right that the game could be better with the difficulty curve. Think that was our main concern for it. Due to a lack of time, we were unable to make levels have specific recipes. We wanted each level to only have the recipes you find inside the recipe book. However, we found subtracting recipes from the level hard to program in the amount of time. Adding them was easy. So we should have gone easier with it... The wall of text in the tutorial was actually added in last minute. Think we had about 30 minutes left till deadline and we had 0 dialogue in the game. Haha. But it was more of a placeholder for a proper tutorial we wanted to do. Though guess it might have ended up confusing people more than helping them out. Also a reset button would probably have been helpful for those that wanted more practice. I do think a page flipping mechanic for the recipe book would be good if we were doing past recipes. Think ideally, the post jam one will have less recipes per level so we can hopefully fit on the screen. Or even just icons to show how to make each dish that's easily visible at all times.

      The word length thing is an interesting suggestion. I think I'm biased because I'm a really good typist so it's really valuable to get feedback from more people on how they feel the typing difficulty is.

      I'm glad you still had fun playing the game :D Thanks again for playing and your feedback! Appreciate it!

  • _J_BALLA
    Lv. 3

    WOW, it's amazing how much got done within 48 hours. The music is great, the title screen song is catchy and cute! The monsters are really cute, I love the pixel art!! I'm really bad at typing games and diner games, so I won't share my embarassing score xD I had trouble figuring out how to make some of the dishes, maybe I just needed to experiment more. Overall it was really fun, your team did a really great job on this!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback!

      Yeah we hope to adjust the difficulty more. Think it is a hard game to jump into! We also want to adjust the recipes and keep them isolated to certain levels too.

      Glad you liked the pixel art. Nelson did a fantastic job with the cutscenes and we were sooo thrilled when he showed us the sketches for them.

  • Fajpaj
    Lv. 5

    This game is presented super well! I couldn't get robot switching to work... maybe I'm just dumb tho lol. It's neat how you took the idea of a cooking game and added the typing aspect to just add an extra layer of stress and make the controls more interesting. good job!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks so much! It should be "shift" for the robots. One robot will get more transparent when it is inactive. Think in the postjam version we might make it more obvious. Glad you enjoyed it, I really love typing games and felt this would be a new twist on them as it involves more than just typing really fast. :D

  • singleshot
    Lv. 43

    Very quarkie, lovely looking, and has a playful atmosphere, and the fact that it's a typing game kinda ruined it for me.

    So I’ll go over the things I liked the things I didn’t and you can take what you can from that.

    I love the intro, the story book folktale intro was lovely. The giggle of the title screen, and how it's the main theme of the game was a great touch.

    The different monster types and art work was great, honestly as far as the art and sound goes I have no issues with the game.

    The gameplay did bother me a bit though.

    Forgetting about my dislike of typing games, there were some issues I had.

    1. The wall of text tutorial really didn’t help much. In Fact it kinda overwhelmed me, I think it would have been better to break up the text with bits of real practice. I know this is a jam, but if you go the full game route then tell me about one step, let me do it, then tell me about the next.

    2. The fact you can keep typing even if you mess up hurts. I would have my finger slip, but because the game doesn't stop me, or let me know I’ll keep typing and get confused about why the robot is not moving. Having it buzz as soon as I enter a letter that's not on any of the available type trees would be really nice. Maybe give the player one or two slip ups, and then reset the progress on the word after. So don’t accept wrong letters in the type script, and if you mess up 2 or more times it clears the script and you need to retype the work. That would make it more forgiving, and also make it clear when you mess up.

    3. I think the difficulty curve needs some adjustments, not including the adding of new recipes. The fact that the letter amount jumps from 3 to 7 without any rhyme or reason kinda messes with me alot. I guess you should add some difficulty settings where the types of words are far more limited. For now I tend to always go for the easiest word to keep it fast. But add on that the increase of recipes I can see this ruining the fun of alot of people.

    I deffenly bias on typing games, being forced to play them in school just makes them non fun no matter the context for me.

    I hope any of this helps at all. Honestly the gameplay is the only thing I don’t love about this game. Good luck!

    Ruin Rise
    Submitted

    Ruin Rise

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the lengthy detailed feedback and for playing our game!

      Also appreciate you state your typing game bias up front haha. I think I'm actually the opposite of you. I did typing games in school and just kinda fell in love with them. HUGE typing game aficionado here.

      Happy you enjoyed the theme! It was kinda organic and came out of the jam. Just adding in a bunch of different things and it somehow came out cohesive?? Ended up loving the creepy cutscene to the quirky main menu transition so I'm happy you enjoyed that too.

      I think those issues you bring up are fair. And I know it is a cliche thing for me to say buuuut: yeah we wanted to do a lot of that but ran out of time :')

      1) Wall of text tutorial wasn't great. At least for a post jam we want the difficulty curve to be a lot smoother so have a proper tutorial.

      2) Yeah this was an unfortunate thing too. You can notice the word you're actually typing on the top left of the screen. It was really really last minute where we added in the commands shaking and the colour on what letter you were on. Which while I think definitely added a better experience, the remnant of the "what you're actually typing is the word on the top left" still remained. I think we'll want to have a proper error feedback with letters turning red when that is the one that is mistyped. Otherwise sometimes people aren't aware they made a mistake. Either that or yeah not accepting the wrong letters. Again, I love typing games so maybe the penalty doesn't bother me as much. I think it might be nice to even change the title of the game to have the subtitle "a typing game" because I understand that genre of game is rather niche too. So that way we can draw the attention of people that are into that sort of thing.

      3) Ideally we wanted to introduce just one dish per level and not have the levels sharing dishes. We found programming wise, removing the dishes and having custom ones for each level kinda hard. It was easier to program just adding in dishes. But we'll do a revamp on difficulty post jam with levels more "themed" to only a subset of dishes.

      Thanks again for leaving detailed feedback and playing the game even though you don't like typing games! And hope your reply button issue is figured out??

      • singleshot
        Lv. 43

        Well I just hope my feedback is helpful for you guys.

        also yes my reply button is here, idk why but that was just the one feed back I was not allowed to reply to lol.

        I knew I wasn't going to like that game as much, so I tried to point out issues only someone with my bias would care about strongly, then think of ways to fix them from a neutral perspective. if it helps improve things at all, then I'm happy.

        like I said before I really do like everything about the game, other then the typing part lol.

  • A-DSL
    Lv. 2

    Absolutely wonderful little game! It feels really complete, it's shocking to believe it was made in 48 hours when this easily feels like it could be a comfy Nintendo DS game you pick up from a store 15 years ago. The spritework is, detailed, charming, and flat-out beautiful in the opening cutscene, and the gameplay feels polished, especially in how it's able to keep track of its in-game real-time and all the real-time elements such as the robots moving around. The only shortcoming from my perspective is that the first text tutorialization made me feel like I was being introduced to far too many concepts in one go with no opportunity to practically apply them, but it's not like the game is super complicated anyway and that's a gamejam for ya. Excellent work!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the lovely feedback! That's really awesome praise :D

      Definitely worked really hard on the polish and trying to get an immersive and fun story going.

      You're totally right there are wayy too many concepts introduced. If we had time, we'd loved to have done a tutorial or a way to restart levels. But yeah, as you said. Game jam time frames :')

      Hope to continue on that and use all the feedback we get for a post jam version though!

  • Ethan Wake
    Lv. 10

    I love the contrast between the spooky intro cutscene and the silly title theme! XD This was clearly a labor of love. There is so much soul in everything, from the visuals to the music to the voices to the sounds... I could go on and on. The typing mechanic is a clever twist. This is seriously professional quality, and if you add more levels post-Jam to make it a full-length game, you could give Overcooked a run for its money!

    (Sadly I am absolutely terrible at this type of game, so I'm glad the story progressed no matter how poorly I scored!)

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks so much for the feedback :D We spent a loooot of time on the weekend to put in everything we wanted to.

      There was a little discussion on the tone we wanted to set that came up after the cutscene was storyboarded. We were all: Man there's a lot of strange contrast here. It's so spooky and then gets really cute. In the end, I think it was a fun tone that just emerged as we were developing the game. With a game jam and not really much time to plan... the interesting contrast was quite serendipitous :D

      I'm a big fan of typing games and felt the majority of typing games I play are very "destruction" based. With typing being a tool used to destroy enemies. So thought it'd be cool to use it more like a way to command.

      We definitely hope to continue developing this post jam. I think with the amount of time on polish and content we wanted to add in, we did not have time to make a tutorial and a way for players to get more in the groove for the game. Especially with the unusual controls and amount of recipes. If only we had time to just put in a restart button as well.... Think it'd make the game more approachable if people were able to play the first level again until they got the hang of it. So decided to make the game passable no matter what for people to at least be able to see the whole thing... :')

      But thanks so much for taking the time to play our game, and thanks for leaving such lovely feedback!

  • Luke No Further
    Lv. 14

    Beautiful Beautiful game, lots of interacting systems, great art, great sounds, great L O R E omgjeez the density of cool ideas and character designs and art assets and content and stuff is impressive.

    I do have to say I was vveerryy overwhelmed in that kitchen. Even with dishes that had one or two steps, I just couldn't make any of them happen other than randomly. I know I'm intellectually capable of mentally processing a 2-step recipie, and this game is a lot like Overcooked and I was like okay cool sure I can handle that, but for some reason the fact I had two robots right from the beginning made me stresssedd I wasn't using them to their full potential / The immediate queue of murderous monsters and the time limit and threat of death. All the wonderful theming just had my nerves shot :') I think this is more of a me problem though. Well done!

    Oh god and the theme song <3

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thank you so much for taking the time to play our game!

      When the theme was announced, ivanbje suggested the idea of monsters coming out of the ocean that needed to be fed. We kinda latched onto that idea immediately. Loved the base idea of cooking delicious food for monsters to avoid being eaten.

      I think if we had time, a way to restart the level would have been good so people don't have to move on until they felt they had a hang of the first level. We just didn't have time with the tutorial either and introduced recipes a little too quickly.

      My sister really wanted to do a song with vocals for awhile now. So happy she was able to do it for the jam except now it's been stuck in my head for awhile. :D

  • Chris
    Patron

    Wow, really impressive how much content is here and how polished everything is. The intro, the music, the titlescreen and that's all before the game even starts. Amazing work!

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback! Definitely killed ourselves trying to put in everything we wanted and it nearly didn't work out. Thankfully we got a lot of the polish in we wanted.

  • Brian
    Lv. 1

    The colors and the music are so immersive that it sucked me into the game immediately. It took me a few playthroughs to get used to the controls and to be able to memorize the receipes, but afterwards I gradually increased my scores.

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback and for playing our game! We really like the vibe the game ended up having. Some juxtaposition of light horror and this really cheerful quirky style after. Glad you enjoyed it and played it a few times. It means a lot as I'm worried people won't give it another chance and figure out some recipes.

  • blixx
    Lv. 1

    First of all let me just say I love the Overcooked games so I had a lot of fun playing this one too. The controls are really crisp with the typing, I wish I had a game like this when I was learning how to type in school. Personally, I thought the ingredient and recipe list was very clear, the only thing that confused me was that I had to move the robot away from plating to combine stuff, but I was able to figure it out fairly quickly. I like how if I wasn't able to interact with something there were no words up there which helped me zone in on the spots I needed to move food too. Coconuts = Bowling Balls

    • Happysquared
      Lv. 15
      Happysquared Designer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      I love overcooked too. And typing games. So just really happy how this entry turned out! Happy you found the ingredient and recipe list clear. I was a bit worried some people wouldn't give it another chance so I put in a lot of gifs in the description... Glad you figured it out :D

      And yeah... I messed up the coconut sprite a bit so it looks like you're serving the monsters bowling balls hahaha.

      There's a lot of polish we want to add but definitely put some effort into prioritising hiding some of the actions that are unavailable. I think it could still be clearer with some special actions colour coded too but we basically submitted with seconds to spare and there's only so much you can do with the timeframe.

  • Frank Nicolosi
    Lv. 1

    I had a great time playing this game! Upon opening the game the song was very inviting and immediatly put me in a good mood and excited to give the game a whirl. It definitely did not disappoint! The art style and music help put me at ease during the fast paced and challenging gameplay. It did take me a few tries to get into a good groove. This is not a bad thing because seeing my score imrpove after each play was very rewarding. I would consider adding a replay button after the game is over, so one does not have to close, reopen, and go through the story in order to play again. I am eager to see what the team comes out with next!

    • Ivanbje
      Patron
      Ivanbje Developer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it. A replay button is great idea, we'll definitely add that to the list. We also wanted to have a total score, combining all 3 levels but we didn't manage to implement it before the deadline. Love to hear that you tried it multiple times and very glad you liked the vibe of things. 🥳😊

  • 2102
    Patron

    Really fun idea and great art, but I found myself to be confused on every dish except for line ice cream and chopped fish. A little more explanation would've been great, but it was really well-made nonetheless.

    • Ivanbje
      Patron
      Ivanbje Developer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Glad you liked it. We wanted to make things more clear and perhaps restrict what you could do but due to time constraints we weren't able to fine tune that as well as we'd hoped. We ended up settling with just having recipe book on Escape as a compromise. Due to that the learning curve was quite steep, but we are ultimately really happy with how things turned out. Thank you for playing.

  • Kyle Landon
    Lv. 11

    This game is absolutely beautiful. The full intro, sound production, music, even the Animal Crossing Style Voices all culminated in a seriously impressive entry. There is definitely a strong learning curve on navigating around, and some icons to guide the player instead of having to always check the recipe would have really helped me, but that being said, I don't know how you all pulled off such a polished project so quickly. Huge kudos!

    • Ivanbje
      Patron
      Ivanbje Developer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      Thank you so much for playing. Really appreciate it. . Everyone did their part and we are really happy with how it turned out. It is true that the learning curve is pretty steep, but since you don't need a certain score to finish we thought it was fine. People can play again if they want to try to get all of the highest ratings. Thank you so much for playing and I am really happy that you played it so early and figured it out without any instructions. It is a huge relief that you can play it without help, we were a bit worried about that. Again, thanks so much!

    • Nyveon
      Patron
      Nyveon Developer of Monster Kitchen Island

      2yrs ago

      What speedy feedback! Thanks!