Cardamine’s Kitchen
Cardamine dreams of owning a 5-star restaurant in her small village. She’ll have to forage for magical plants and hunt dangerous creatures if she wants to make her dream a reality.
Cardamine’s Kitchen is a fantasy, hack’n’slash, restaurant management game. You hunt and forage in the forests and then run a restaurant with the items you collected. There are multiple forests with different themes that contain a variety of ingredients.
This game was made for my 2020 CCS Junior Game Projects class, with a team of 18 students and our instructor. All the students pitched game ideas and mine was chosen. I love food and adventures games, so I wanted to combined the two. My inspirations for this were Diner Dash and Legend of Zelda.
It feels more appropriate to call this a proof of concept since it’s not a finished game and probably never will be 😅. The final product is very different from what I originally pitched, but I’m still proud of what we were able to accomplish, especially since Cardamine’s Kitchen was developed remotely through Unity Collaboration and Discord due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The Prototype
Cardamine
This is the original concept art I made for my pitch. I had the idea that the village would be in the middle of the forest and kind of ramshackled with mushrooms everywhere. I wanted the characters to have a country vibe in their restaurant uniforms (pink dress with apron) and I referenced WWI/WWII British infantry and cavalry uniforms to design their hunting gear (green dress and spiked toadstool helmet).
Foxglove
Village
Restaurant
I also made a prototype for my pitch. The restaurant originally had a 3rd person camera and you could move around in it, and the village area used to be small.
I imagined there would eventually be NPCs scattered around, you could go into buildings, some of them would be shops, some of them would be homes.
The restaurant level would play like Diner Dash, very fast paced with a lot of tasks to manage, but make it 3D.
Forest
The forests would be the most expansive part of the game where all the exploring and action happens. Inspired by Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Galaxy, I had the idea for there to be a normal forest, a desert, an ocean where you go under water, a floating/sky forest, and a twilight/horror forest.
Concept Art
Once the idea was decided on, the class separated into groups and started working on concept art for each level: The village, restaurant, and two forests (the normal forest and twilight forest were chosen). This is concept art for the 1st and 3rd level of the restaurant done by Daphne Fiato.
Restaurant lv.1
Restaurant lv.3
This is concept art for the twilight forest by Eli McCaffrey and Rhiannon Orr.
This is the concept for the village (left) by Sarah Chene and concepts for the plant life in the normal forest by Eli McCaffrey.
Sarah Chene created a 3D model for ideation of the village and then later built off it to make the final level.
These are concepts for the animals in the forests. I created a variety of creatures for the different terrains in the levels and designed them to fit in a fantasy setting.
I used real animals as reference and then added weird features and abilities to make them into something new.
Characters
These are the final redesigns for Cardamine, Foxglove, and Azalea by Derek Tath. With the 3D character model in mind, the clothing was simplified, and the helmet was made smaller because with the 3rd person camera above the player, the original helmet would have obscured Cardamine’s model too much.
Alongside Cardamine’s redesigns came concepts for her weapons by Denis Guisgand. We wanted there to be a variety of gameplay so we chose a sword, magic staff, and arrows.
