If you love cooking and time management games, then you've probably already heard of Mytona's Cooking Diary. Launched on August 6, 2018, this game has already celebrated its 6th birthday, but it's still a titan of its genre. Today, the Mytona team is sharing the recipe for Cooking Diary's success!
Ingredients:
- Tasty plot—431 episodes
- Characters—38 unique heroes
- Customization options— 8,969 elements
- Guilds—905,481
- A variety of events and contests
- A dash of humor
- Grandpa Grey's secret ingredient (read to the end to discover the secret!)
Cooking instructions
Step 1: Preparing the lore
Take one fresh plot, then sprinkle in some unexpected twists and humor to taste. Thoroughly mix them with charismatic characters until you achieve a generous helping of deep lore. Now to equally divide the plot between districts and restaurants, starting with the first venue—a Burger Joint belonging to talented chef Leonard Grey, who is also the player's grandpa. From there, the culinary fever will spread throughout all districts—from Colafornia to New Yogurt, from Schnitzeldorf to Sushijima! And in each of the 27 districts, new challenges and exciting stories await. There are currently 160 restaurants, bakeries, and diners just waiting for the right chef to help them rise from the ashes like a culinary phoenix!
Step 2: Time to add customization
Let's take the lore and add over 8,000 customization items. These include 1,776 outfits and 440 hairstyles, as well as 88 sets of facial features for creating the perfect avatar. To infuse the game with an aroma of interior design, mix in 864 items for the player's home along with over 5,600 for restaurants. For a sweet aftertaste, add outfits for pets, who have a wardrobe of over 200 items of clothing—and counting!
Step 3: Seasoning with in-game events
Now it's time to take this prepared base and add a variety of tasks and events. Slice the game designers' ideas with the sharp knife of analytics, use code to mold them into neat events, and generously sprinkle them with rewards. Make sure that all the prepared events taste good together and reveal the game's special flavor layer by layer! The second week of August, for example, had a juicy filling of nine different events. We kicked off the week with Culinary Experiments—an event all about completing levels faster than your opponents. The spicy taste of competition was balanced by baking a cake in the Sugar Rush event. Over the week, players munched their way through a whole tasting menu of events—among the courses was a cute pet game, a crazy bet with celebrity chef Creighton, and much more. But the true culinary romantics patiently waited to fuel up the Food Truck and head off to tackle a new week of delicious achievements!
Step 4: Mixing in guilds
The game is already looking appetizing, but we can't miss the next important step: guilds. Over 905,000 guilds have been created in Cooking Diary, where online chefs find friends and show off their outfits and achievements! These days, guild events are a long-standing and significant part of our gameplay. Important: introduce guild events and tasks gradually, ensuring that they complement each other. For example, the task to earn hearts from satisfied customers showed different results depending on how busy guilds were at the time. When we ran the task in parallel with other guild events, the daily income rose by 5.71%, but when the task ran alone, we saw a 13.14% rise.
Step 5: We're not afraid of experimentation or mistakes!
When cooking up a game, you can't be afraid to make mistakes. The story of any perfect dish is peppered with experiments, hits, and misses. Cooking Diary has seen a couple of unsuccessful developments, but our team skillfully transformed them into stepping stones toward success.
In June 2019, Cooking Diary first introduced pets. Ordinary four-legged friends could be adopted for free, while rare ones cost rubies (the in-game currency). But it turned out that simply buying pets with rubies wasn't all that interesting for most players! Just like in real life. That's why we moved rare pets over to the Path to Glory event. Now, players fulfill customers' orders to get pets instead. And it worked! By finding the right place in the game for pets, our team increased revenue by an unbelievable 42% in the spring of 2020!
Here's another example of the importance of using the game's ingredients correctly: Tasty Hills' fashion crisis. What happened? When we first launched the game, full sets of clothes gave certain perks, such as extra time so that dishes wouldn't burn, the guarantee that customers would calmly wait for their orders, and other useful things. But these functions turned sets of clothes into superhero costumes—players would turn up to restaurants for their shifts and only wear the sets that helped them complete levels. Meanwhile, all their hard-earned outfits gathered dust in their wardrobes... To overcome Tasty Hills' fashion crisis, the team removed the boosters from clothing sets, which led to a style revolution alongside an increase in outfit sales. That's how 69% of players' outfits were purchased this year: of these, 18% were with vouchers, 12% with rubies, and 38% with real money.
Step 6: Mouth-watering presentation
When serving up a game, the presentation is just as important as the taste! You can get a taste of Cooking Diary via the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, or AppGallery Huawei! But just posting your game on various platforms won't cut the mustard—you need to advertise it on social media by riding the waves of trends and making creative posts. Check out Cooking Diary's pages on Instagram, Facebook, X, and other social networks—you'll find tons of interesting contests and activities.
Collabs with well-known services and apps are great for boosting popularity. For instance, Cooking Diary previously launched a unique update in collaboration with Netflix, which offered players an upside-down perspective on a familiar city and let them hire their favorite characters from Stranger Things as kitchen assistants.
On September 11, the game launched its collaboration with YouTube! Any player can take part in the Path to Glory event and get a free 2-month subscription to YouTube Premium! Available for the USA, UK, Korea, Japan, Canada, France, and Germany.
Picture-perfect presentation can launch a game to the crème de la crème of the world's best games. Cooking Diary has come a long way and earned the love of its audience. The game ranks 2nd among all time management games worldwide, and has been awarded IMGA's People's Choice Award and the Webby People's Voice Award!
Just like that of any other successful game, the recipe for Cooking Diary is constantly evolving. Some of the game's components may change, our balance strategy and event calendar may be revised, but one thing remains unchanged. Grandpa Grey's secret ingredient is... soul! After all, tasty dishes and awesome games have a lot in common: you can't make either of them without love and dedication. And the Mytona team nurtures this passion and is raring to conquer new heights with Cooking Diary!