Release date: February 25th, 2015
Income for 30 days: $1.04M
LTV, All time: $1,56

Cooking simulators (tycoons, time managers; different studios call them differently) are a very old genre that has not changed much since its beginnings.

Even the most popular, top ten cooking games in the top grossing and free arcades (such as Cooking Madness and the two parts of Cooking Joy), do not rank in the top hundred of all games.

Engagement in games of this genre is usually generated not by the story, characters, or depth of gameplay but by giving the player a sense of progression.

Gameplay
Most modern games of this genre follow a specific, fairly linear pattern.

Cooking time management levels:

• You have to keep clicking or dragging the ingredients of the dish into the play area and then drag the finished dish to the buyer;
• From level to level, the number of ways to prepare a dish increases, as does the number of dishes that can be ordered;

Linear meta with upgrades:

• For coins earned in the main game, you can buy equipment upgrades in the location;
• Higher level upgrades usually require both soft and hard currency;
• When the player completes all levels in one restaurant, he gains access to the next one. In each new restaurant, the development of dishes, equipment, and levels starts from scratch. As a rule, a new restaurant differs from the previous ones visually and in terms of the logic used to compile dishes;

Cooking Fever has all the usual mechanics of the cooking genre, but this game differs from them by a much more advanced meta (additional game mechanics and loops). The soft currency in this game is coins, and the hard currency is diamonds.

Interesting gameplay features

Equipment breakdown

Sometimes this or that device in the level breaks down and can be repaired for the previously accumulated coins. On the one hand, this increases the tension in time management; on the other, the player loses if they have no coins at the time of the incident. Neither the money earned during the level nor received for viewing ads in the game store can be spent on this repair

Usually casual games try not to punish the player and make him feel that he is progressing even if he loses. For example, if a player makes a mistake in the farm by stopping production of the wrong resource, he will still get that resource despite time losing fact. There is also an equipment breakdown that cannot be controlled by the player, which can prevent him from passing the level. It might be worth changing this mechanic so that it rewards the player instead of punishing him.

Desserts

Starting at about halfway through each restaurant level, the player gets the opportunity to sell desserts. The supply of desserts is limited and transfers between levels. Desserts can only be bought and upgraded with diamonds or advertising.

Desserts are available only to certain visitors and for a certain time, less than the entire order. This forces the player to act quickly and creates time pressure in deciding whether or not to spend a valuable dessert on this guest.

It is easy to buy a dessert accidentally (and, as a result, to spend diamonds on it), thoughtlessly, because each dessert doesn’t cost a lot, and therefore the player may find that they miss quite a bit of their diamonds by the end of the level. This may cause the player to become dissatisfied and feel they have no control over their spending, which may cause them to leave the game.
Особенно эффективна эта механика в испытаниях, где игроку часто будет не хватать заработанных денег до прохождения уровня.

This seems to be an interesting narrative point to increase the patience of the visitor. It is not the player who decides to click the button in the interface, but the visitor places an additional order that increases his patience.

Purchase of furniture and furnishings for the restaurant.

You can upgrade not just the cooking equipment but also the locations themselves, which allows you to increase the sizes of tips, visitor waiting time, and the number of visitors per level.

This gives the players the feeling of setting up their own restaurant and customising the decor from scratch. Similar customization of the in-game locations is found in many high-turnover casual games, such as building a castle in Royal Match or restoring a house in Homescapes.

However, the only place where the player can see the improvements made is in the decor window of the restaurant. It would be nice if the improvements made were also visible on the levels, so that the player could clearly see his progress and the reward for the effort invested. This is well done in Happy Clinic from the same publisher. For example, when you buy chairs to increase the patience of visitors, they appear on the level and patients sit on them.

• Instead of a linear progression from one restaurant to another, starting at a certain point in the gameplay, you can choose any restaurant on the city map.
  
• After you have finished a location, you can pay a certain amount of coins and diamonds to start a time-limited test. The test consists of 15 levels of inc.

As inconspicuously as the difficulty level changes in the main game, it increases in the trials and events.

Monetization

Cash register

The main way to monetize th