Dungeon Cook

Chaotic Fighting & Cooking Game

  • Team Size: 28 People
  • Role(s): Producer, Programmer, Animator
  • Duration: 8 Weeks
  • Grade Achieved: 70%
  • Engine: Unreal Engine
  • Languages: Blueprint

    • Dungeon Cook is a single-player cooking game with fighting elements.
    In this game, the player is tasked with entering dungeons to fight various monsters and scavenge ingredients to bring back to the kitchen to cook meals for customers in exchange for coins.

    I was the producer on this project. I used a facilitative leadership style—allowing the leads to manage their own departments. This gave me the freedom to focus on core systems using my technical skillset, which was necessary due to our limited number of programmers. Over the 8-week development, I programmed the following:

  • Food Data Structure
  • World Interaction System
  • Crafting Systems
  • Character Customisation
  • AI Refactor

    • While managing the project, I also filled the skill gap in animation by creating several character animations. I had to learn animation for this task, so while not perfect, I'm proud of the quality achieved as a beginner.

    Gameplay Video

    1 / 3
    2 / 3
    3 / 3

    Interaction System

    I created the interaction system for Dungeon Cook using a capsule collider. This decision was made because the player could overlap with multiple interactable objects at once.
    Using Unreal's built-in colliders was faster for development, but performance could have been improved by using a sphere trace and filtering by object type.
    After gathering a list of valid objects, I ran distance checks to identify the closest one, which then became the selected interactable.

    Food Structure & Crafting System

    The food structure used data assets. These acted as blueprints for the crafting system. Each ingredient had a unique ID for fast lookup when checking recipes.
    If the recipe matched, the player could activate the cooking station, which would spawn a ghost to cook the dish for them.

    Animation

    With no Level 6 animator on the team, I stepped up to animate various creatures and characters in the game.
    Here's a list of animations I created:

  • Dragon - Idle, Attack, Attack Start
  • Potato Pig - Idle, Walk, Run, Charge-up
  • Player Character - Idle, Walk, Attack, All Trailer Animations
  • Carrot Mandrake - Idle, Appear, Attack
  • Onion Mandrake - Idle, Appear, Attack
  • Dirt Golem - Idle, Walk, Attack

    • Producer

    As the producer, I ensured clear and consistent communication across the team. I kept development on track, mitigated scope creep, and resolved team conflicts effectively.

    One challenge arose early in the project with an oversized leadership team—initially, four art leads. I scaled this down to a concept artist (based in Stoke) and a 3D artist (based in London), which made the structure more efficient.

    In Week 4, it became clear the team's capacity was lower than anticipated, mainly due to member absences. As a result, we pivoted from multiplayer to a single-player experience to ensure polish and stability.

    This role helped me grow significantly in understanding team dynamics, conflict resolution, and cross-discipline coordination. I would gladly work with this team again.