Toca Boca Days
Cooking Stations
My Role: Feature Owner, System, Gameplay & Tools Designer
Team Size: 10+
This feature lets players roleplay cooking in an immersive and social way. Through timed button-tap gameplay, players cook dishes that spawn in the world and can be shared with others, whether perfectly cooked or hilariously burnt.
Responsibilities
Designed core gameplay, UX flows and interaction rules.
Defined animation & prop requirements for scalability.
Collaborated with art, animation, audio, and coders to align systems.
Walkthrough
Brief / Challenge
Fit into the broader vision of critical mass role-play features: many small activities across the world that together create many things to do.
Add role-play activities that felt like “living in the world.”
More social payoffs with mechanics that spark fun group scenarios and shared play.
Create a flexible blueprint system that could scale into deeper mechanics over time.
Design Approach
1. Role-play first
Framed primarily as a social & fantasy-driven activity
Designed as play anchors where friends could gather, role-play, and create their own fun.
2. Simplicity
Mechanics intentionally simple and accessible to avoid friction in the sandbox.
Outcomes (perfect / good / burnt dish) added variety without overcomplicating, adding some fun small twist.
3. Social payoff
Positioned as social hotspots, creating moments to gather, spectate, and share results.
Outcomes designed to be playful & silly, amplifying the storytelling potential.
4. Future-proof blueprint
System built as a template: any new station could be plugged in with the same framework (or anything else using the same framework).
Future extensibility baked in:
Ingredient sink for unique dishes.
Expanded outcome variety
System Summary & Animation Logic
Cooking Stations were highly animation-heavy, with multiple states that needed to be clearly defined for both coders and animators. To avoid ambiguity and make sure we spoke a common language, I created flow diagrams and state breakdowns that mapped out every possible transition from starting the interaction through each cooking phase.
These visual references served as a shared source of truth, aligning the team around how the system should behave and how animations needed to sync with gameplay logic.
Animation states breakdown
A simple visual reference that summarizes how Cooking Stations function within the system.
Reflection
Cooking Stations added clear social role-play moments that was well recieved by our players. By leaning into fantasy and player expression, they created spontaneous fun while laying the groundwork for future complexity.
They aligned well with the game’s long-term vision by contributing to a critical mass of “things to do” in the game that made the world feel more alive, rich, and playful.
