January 12, 2024

Hey there, chefs— welcome to Co-op Kitchen’s development log! Why are we starting one? Well, Family Style started as a meager college project, and while our original team dreamed that it would explode in popularity, we were stunned when it actually did. We loved building up a player base, and this dev log is just one tool we want to use to communicate with all of you.

We also just announced Family Style 2, and that’s no coincidence with us starting a dev log. You can expect teasers of things to come, struggles we’re (hopefully) overcoming, and a general behind-the-scenes look at our small team as we develop Family Style 2.

Last week, we asked chefs across all our socials for questions they want us to answer in our inaugural issue. We got some really awesome questions, so thank you to everyone who threw their curiosity our way! Check out some of our answers below:

Q: Is Family Style 2 an update/revamp to Family Style or is it a new/different game?
Family Style 2 will be a completely new game and separate app from the Family Style you know and love. While the sequel will maintain much of the core gameplay that gives this hectic cooking game its identity, there will also be a myriad of new features, visuals, and gameplay elements that will freshen up the experience.

Q: When is it releasing?
Sometime near the end of 2024. We don’t have an exact release date… yet. Please follow us on any of our social platforms to stay up to date! Discord | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook (shameless plug)

Q: Will Family Style 2 have better support?
Absolutely yes. Family Style was built with software that simply could not scale the way we wanted. It has dependencies that have become obsolete and near impossible to manage. Due to additional external factors outside of our control, our ability to maintain and upkeep Family Style dwindled despite our desire to fix its issues.

However, we’re rebuilding everything from the ground up this time around! Art, codebase, device support, everything. Family Style 2 will have dedicated eyes on it to ensure all of its bugs get squashed as well. Maybe even additional features or modes post-launch. Wait what— who said that?

Q: What are the new ingredients/recipes/cookwares?
We’re going to keep our lips pretty sealed on this for now… but we are going to be including bagels. Perhaps you noticed this delicious breakfast goodie in our teaser image!

Q: Can we submit puns for the loading screens between rounds?
This is a fantastic idea! Join our Discord if you haven’t already, and we’ll probably host a little contest there in the future.

Q: The art looks new, what inspired the new look?
We’ll be deep diving into this in future dev logs. It really merits a whole issue, and our new artist would love to talk about this. Stay tuned!

February 16, 2024

A big goal of Family Style 2 is to make cooking more meaningful. During the development of the original game, we had a similar lofty goal, but due to time constraints we ended up shipping with what you can experience today: a simple 6-tap interaction.

Gameplay footage from Smiley_Builder on Youtube! Check them out :)

What do we mean by meaningful though? Do we mean more fun? More interactive? Well, one of our design pillars is geared toward wringing out as much functionality and affordance as we can from the mobile platform. Having cooking equate to quick, subsequent taps just doesn’t… cut it for the sequel. We want to leverage mobile controls so that cooking feels more substantive and better matches the real-world action. This sounds more meaningful, right?

We’ve been experimenting with a myriad of different ways to achieve this! Some minigames involve a little bit of patience as things cook, forcing you to interact when the moment is just right. Other minigames are more active and require more of your attention and focus. Some are a combination of both patience and action. Below are some mockups of the skillet and fryer minigames with which we’ve been toying. Expect more details about these in the future.

The idea is to play on the tension that cooperative cooking can create, forcing the player to decide to split their focus between cooking, listening to teammates, and finishing their recipe. In the original game, this split focus worked wonders for creating chaos- and we want to lean more into that direction! By adding more engagement to cooking instead of just mindless tapping, we’re effectively adding another factor to split focus between. More chaos? You asked for it!

This does beg the question though: what happens if you don’t cook “correctly”? If cooking is now more of a minigame than before, what happens if you “lose” and don’t properly cook the ingredient? Hm. Good question. Stay tuned :)

March 21, 2024

Family Style was an ideal student project in a lot of ways and a really challenging one in others. One gameplay element that falls into the “oh this isn’t so bad” category, is the fact that ingredients, once added to a valid plate, just have their visuals… stack on top of one another. Easy. We didn’t need to do any additional logic checks. This initially simplified a lot from a development standpoint— especially for a bunch of students. It even visually worked well for certain recipe families like nachos and pizzas! In the long run though, this implementation direction turned out to be more of a hindrance.

Since you stack everything on top of nachos, it’s the perfect recipe family for Family Style’s plating system.

There are actually a couple hindrances. Visually, some recipes do not have nearly as good of a show as nachos or pizzas; I’m looking at you, protein-plus-sides recipes. Furthermore, stacking ingredients fails to capture all the different types of real-world plating. This system additionally restricted the creativity of our recipe design since we had to deal with constraints around ingredient order (to ensure stacked ingredients show well) and recipe types (some just don’t work with this plating system). But that’s all in the past. We’re in the future now with Family Style 2. Let’s talk about what we’re doing differently.

So we knew that we wanted to change this system. Going through a handful of different, scalable plating layouts, we landed on the following set of four:

Since you stack everything on top of nachos, it’s a great recipe for Family Style’s plating system.

These new layouts provide much needed visual flexibility. Each colored circle here represents a rough location, rotation, and size of a recipe’s ingredients relative to one another. With (A), we preserve the stackable essence of the original plating system, while in (C) we can also display two main ingredients side-by-side. (B) and (D) are similar in that they both allow for plating recipes like protein-plus-sides in a more aesthetic way, but in (D) we can spotlight the “star” ingredient of a recipe by giving it more real estate on the plate. We can now show not one, not two, but three different ingredients on a plate! We could even stack additional ingredients upon each of the individual ingredients in (B), (C), and (D) layouts if we’re feeling fun and flirty with some designs. These are really starting to feel more like recipes!

With our lovely first pass art, we're already ballin' hard.

With this nice visual framework, we also gain much needed flexibility in the design department. We can now actually curate recipes with the same level of precision as Michelin star chefs so that their final visual state feels like the real-world recipe they’re meant to simulate. It’s a powerful perspective shift, because we’re no longer plagued by readability problems or design constraints like ingredient order. While we won’t divulge into the depths of our recipe design philosophies in this post, this visual framework really helps break down recipes into modular bits of thinking which really expedites the design process.

To top this dev log off, we’ll talk a little bit about our custom tool we wrote to put all this fun design thinking into practice. Essentially we built an inspector tool that allows us to add ingredients to any size recipe we want and modify its transform any way we want. Once we’re happy with its plating, we just click a big button to export its contents into a JSON format. Our other gameplay systems can then easily read the recipe JSON’s information and place the ingredients properly when they’re added to the plate.

This is not a real recipe. Or is it? If you read this, let us know in the Discord and maybe we'll make it real.

This tool gives us precise control over each ingredient and provides a very clear visual of what exactly the recipe will look like when it’s complete— mostly independent of ingredient art statuses. It will undoubtedly save us a lot of effort for future recipe designs, and it’s also great for collaborating within the team, as we can send screenshots to one another about recipes we’re in the middle of developing. Our engine switch to Unity was already paying dividends, and this is a really great bonus. Not only are we more experienced developers this time around, but we’re also working with a powerful engine, so we might as well squeeze every last drop of utility out of it!

July 3, 2024

We’re finally back with some dev log action! Big life changes on a small dev team really affect workflow- who knew? Anyway, let’s talk about how Family Style 2 is making cooking more meaningful… again. Our 2nd dev log, MAKING COOKING FUN, talked a little bit about how we’re converting the act of cooking into a more engaging activity by forcing more tension on player decisions: should I finish cooking this ingredient? Or pass these other ingredients to my teammate? Can I afford to do both simultaneously?

However, we’re not here to rehash what we’ve already talked about. Instead, let’s unveil what happens if players don’t cook “correctly” (as was teased previously). Since cooking is now its own encapsulated mini-game, there’s necessarily a “success” and “failure” state when engaging with cookware now. Success looks like the OG Family Style: the cooked ingredient pops off the cookware - hooray! Failure looks a little different depending on the cookware. Let’s talk about one: the skillet.

Here's a little sneak peek at our current skillet minigame implementation!

The skillet cooking mini-game is fairly simple as it is implemented on our end. Once an ingredient is added to the cookware, the player must tap the cookware when its “cook line” has crossed an appropriate threshold. Doing so incorrectly does what you might expect a real skillet to do if you overcook an ingredient… it starts to smoke! In this instance of what we’re calling a mini-hazard, players can tap the puffs of smoke to dispel them into tinier and tinier puffs until they’re fully dissipated; however, as the smoke puffs bounce around the bounds of the screen, if they cross the left/right sides of the screen, they pass over to adjacent players just like ingredients! Those players then subsequently must dispel the puffs… but they definitely know who to blame for the disruption.

A mockup visualizing the skillet's smoky mini-hazard.

There are a couple important design decisions embedded in this interaction that we want to highlight. We want “failing” a cookware interaction to not feel like a slap in the face. Notice how there is no impact on team score or ingredient drop frequency or anything directly related to players succeeding the level. The smoke mini-hazard is just an additional layer of stress thrown in. It’s disruptive- which is fun in a hectic party game- but not destructive- which is not fun when all your teammates are trying to win the round. The mini-hazards are meant to induce chaos into the kitchen, which leans into our core pillars.

The fryer's minihazard! Can you guess the interaction here?

Second, all mini-hazards are meant to allow the player to continue mostly playing the game while active, meaning no mini-hazards should dramatically impede players from passing ingredients or assembling dishes. Some of our inspiration games, like Spaceteam, have hazards, like the classic wormhole, that completely derail players from what they were doing and force players to deal with it. While we have hazards like this in the works (👀), we want cookware mini-hazards to be demanding. They should be impactful enough that players feel the pressure to address them, but still allow leeway for players to continue their previous train of thought.

We’re currently finding the exact boundaries of this design philosophy, as our cutting board currently has a pretty disruptive mini-hazard- but hey, we’re playtesting it!

January 26, 2025

ABOUT PRODUCTION

Well, well, well… It’s been quite some time since we’ve chatted on this platform! There were a couple dev logs planned to be released in early and late August 2024; however, it was in the first week of last August that Family Style 2 production had to abruptly and unexpectedly shut down. We will not dive into the odds and ends that caused it, but just know that it completely bricked our 2024 release plans which was beyond disheartening and frustrating.

Despite it all, we’re back, and we’re ready to rock-and-roll into 2025! We currently don’t have a new release date, as we have yet to decide as a team on a full 2025 roadmap, but we’re fairly confident in a Q4 2025 release. We plan on flipping this unfortunate loss of time into something positive (we’re an optimistic trio of devs), so we’re going to use the extra time to build out additional features and add extra polish to make Family Style 2 feel even more special when it releases. Please continue to be patient with us, and you can expect a lot more updates along the way!

PLAYER PROFILES

In the meantime, here’s a little sneak peek at a brand new feature coming to Family Style 2: player profiles. This feature will provide players with a more concrete in-game identity and allow a wider breadth of player expression. Profiles will have displayable visuals and be customizable in a number of different ways. Below is the very first profile mockup:

First iteration of a player profile mockup.

Let us be clear: this is just a mockup of the first iteration! We have since iterated on this design and are honing in on a more thematic profile visual that we’re holding close to the chest for now. Regardless, there are still a handful of elements in this mockup that we can talk about and will be editable by players:

Name — player name; currently we want to allow players to set and edit this whenever and however they like, as long as the name is appropriate of course.

Plate visual — plates are central to the Family Style experience, so the core of the profile will be a plate that can be swapped out with other unlockable visuals.

In-game plates that double as player profile visuals… more to come?!

Ingredient stickers — purchasable stickers that players will be able to place and orient on their profile plate however they like (most likely with some currently unknown restrictions e.g. 3 stickers max).

Just a mockup for the purposes of this dev log, but you can expect stickers of every ingredient!

Profile border — an outer border that encompasses the entirety of the player name, plate, and stickers. In our latest iteration, this border looks the most different from all the other elements here.

Profiles will be a pretty integral part of the core player loop; you can expect to see your profile displayed on the home screen, in lobbies, in-game, and potentially at the end-game screen with all your friends. An in-game editor will allow players to meticulously perfect their profiles until they’re juuust right.

That’s all we’ll tease for now; we need to get back to work! In the next couple dev logs, we’ll be talking about our thoughts on monetization and how that ties into profiles, gameplay, and everything else. Stay tuned!

February 18, 2025

FAMILY STYLE 1’S MODEL

WLet’s talk about money… But before talking about Family Style 2, let’s contextualize our decisions by talking through the original Family Style and its monetization history.

As we’ve said before, we did not expect Family Style to explode in popularity overnight (literally). In an instant, we went from having maybe- MAYBE- 1 concurrent game at any given time to 500+. As a result, our servers (and our wallets) were under insane duress. Our server infrastructure was hanging by a thread. We needed to find a comprehensive and quick way to cover our server costs.

An old tweet where we notified fans that the game would be offline for a few days while we implemented interstitial ads.

Our in-game shop just had a few cosmetics purchases, but that was nowhere near close to generating enough income to cover the flood of server costs, so we had to quickly pivot and add interstitial ads at the end of each round. Coupled with the addition of many more servers, the issues were resolved.

This was all great, but the implementation and thought process behind our monetization model was really sloppy, and we should have at least considered other models before our full release.

FAMILY STYLE 2’S MODEL

With Family Style 2, we thought about our model from the start. The game will always be free to play (F2P). The F2P model guarantees the highest player accessibility, ensuring there is no financial barrier to cooking it up with friends. Below are our monetization pillars that are helping us navigate our development.

Our pillars that continue to help guide our decision-making around monetization.

PAINLESS AD EXPERIENCE

In-game ads will be kept to a minimum. Mobile games have a reputation for integrating “dark design” patterns, which includes saturating gameplay with tons of ads, and generally employing predatory strategies to milk players of all their money — we’re not a fan of that. We’ll have to employ an additional interstitial ad or two, but don’t worry about being inundated with ads around every corner. In general, the adverts will strive to be “rewarded,” so that those who opt in to watch will be compensated in-game with extra currency or some other reward.

CURRENCY FOR EVERYONE

We want to integrate an in-game currency. This currency will be used exclusively to buy in-app purchases (IAPs), most notably cosmetics: new themes, profile stickers, and other goodies. Real money cannot buy these items outright; however, real money can buy currency bundles to expedite currency curves.

A simple diagram illustrating how both player types, Premium and F2P, are funneled through earning/acquiring currency in order to purchase IAPs.

NO PAYING TO WIN

This currency can also be earned just from playing rounds of Family Style with friends! Additional means of earning currency includes login bonuses, special events, and even achievements (more to come about those in a future dev log). In this way, F2P players don’t have to spend any money to purchase the same things as those who wish to spend money— this is especially true as nothing that can be purchased will enhance or otherwise unbalance one player from another during gameplay. That simply wouldn’t be fun.

There’s our current monetization thinking: the game will stay F2P. We will continue to integrate ads, but nowhere near the level of other predatory games. In-game cosmetics will be a thing, but they can only be purchased with an in-game currency that is earned from real money or just playing the game. We have a few more details to iron out, but that’s the long and short of it!

July 13, 2025

GAMEPLAY+

Family Style’s gameplay has two central components: the programmed mechanics, like passing ingredients between phones and assembling recipes, and the organic communication aspect between you and your other chefs. These components work really well in tandem. As we talked about in a previous dev log entry about mini-hazards, for Family Style 2, while we love the interplay of these two systems, we want to incorporate more in-game opportunities to encourage new types of chaotic communication.

Enter: shift hazards.

WHAT’S A SHIFT HAZARD?

Like with cookware, shift hazards are like gameplay friction events that players must overcome or deal with while assembling recipes. However, unlike cookware mini-hazards which are triggered by poor cooking and only last a short duration, shift hazards last an entire shift (or “round,” but shift sounds more thematic 🙂) and cannot be dismissed until the shift is completed.

A stubbed-in hazard tape asset appears before a shift starts to signal the upcoming shift hazard. Also check out our cool updated UI!

We’ve been thinking about rounds with hazards as being similar to “boss levels” in other games. The stakes are higher, the gameplay gets trickier, and the chaos ramps the heck up. Don’t worry though, we plan on signalling rounds with hazards so players know to lock in before ingredients start falling. Currently, every ~3 shifts will be followed by a round with a shift hazard, though we may fiddle with this number. Depends on how evil we’re feeling.

A chart looking at how shift hazards introduce spikes of difficulty as players progress through more rounds.

WHAT’S A SHIFT HAZARD?

We currently have about six different types of shift hazards we’re developing (with a few more in the ideation phase), but they generally fall into two design categories: individual and collaborative.

Individual shift hazards are ones that are local to your table and don’t directly interact with your co-chefs. An example is a hazard we’ve been calling Cross-Breeze. When triggered, winds will fly through your kitchen table and push your plate and ingredients in random, oscillating directions with increasing intensity. Interacting with this hazard is done on your own without any help from your chefs, but watch out! Once the breezes reach a certain intensity, they can push ingredients to your co-chef’s tables, indirectly cluttering their space!

Cross-Breeze in action! This is the lowest difficulty version of the shift hazard, but trust us, it can make cluttered tables really hectic!

Collaborative shift hazards mandate coordination between you and your co-chefs. An example would be Lights Out, where randomly throughout the round… the lights… go out. The screens of all chefs will go nearly pitch-black and only by having everybody simultaneously shake their phone for a sufficient amount of time will the lights flicker back on! Unlike Cross-Breeze, you can imagine how much more communication this shift hazard requires with your co-chefs.

Lights Out doesn’t fully impede your vision, but trying to cook ingredients while the lights are out? Now that’s just dangerous!

The combination of these two types of shift hazards gives us a lot of freedom to develop a wide spectrum of fun hazards, but we also think the combination gives players a less homogenous play experience over the course of multiple games!

A HAZARDOUS SUCCESS

We’re super excited to finally unveil shift hazards! They inject exactly the right amount, and the right type, of chaos that we were hoping for. As we continue to further refine their balance, their art, and their impact on core gameplay, we’ve been gaining more and more confidence in their addition to the sequel. We’re super excited to concoct more diabolical hazards for you all, so stay tuned for more 😈

May 2, 2026

GOOD INGREDIENTS?

What makes a “good” ingredient for Family Style? The core gameplay thrives on chaotic, overlapping communication. Everyone has recipes that need to be completed, and thus everyone needs a specific set of ingredients at any given time.

How many ingredients is too many ingredients???

Our gameplay algorithm tends to drop ingredients a player needs on another player’s tables which forces them to communicate. We try to incite the “Pass me the- uh, the uh.. Purple round thing?!” type of moments as often as we can, because it adds a fun wrinkle of complexity in an otherwise simple passing mechanic. Ingredients are an absolute core component to the game, so we’ve curated the game’s ingredient set based on a number of parameters to facilitate the type of gameplay we’re targeting.

PARAMETER 1 - RECOGNIZABILITY

Our first parameter of a “good” ingredient is recognizability. Without some semblance of recognizability, players wouldn’t know what to call out for. For clarity’s sake, we don’t mean recognizability in the sense of knowing what an ingredient is, but rather recognizing an ingredient's form in a sea of other ingredients.

In Family Style, we strived to have every ingredient take on a unique form factor so that even if the entire ingredient were monochrome, it would still be unique and recognizable; however, in Family Style 2, we are loosening that constraint a bit since, in real life, ingredients have tons of overlapping and similar form factors. So to compensate, we’re attempting to add more details to each ingredient to help distinguish them, and if players are observant, they can make the distinction.

Broccoli, cauliflower, and eggs. A balanced meal.

Take a look at the ingredients above. While both ingredients on the right are eggs, their forms are very unique. Meanwhile, the cauliflower and broccoli have very similar forms. If both of these veggies were monochrome, so colors were no longer a distinguishing factor, the stems of the broccoli and cauliflowers would give their identities away.

PARAMETER 2 - VARIETIES

Have you ever read an online recipe, and in the ingredient list it just lists “onions”? Okay, like what type of onions? Yellow? Red? Green? Similarly, have you ever tried to cook a dish and realized you were missing an ingredient? But after a little research, you learned you could substitute it with a different ingredient? Well, we wanted to incorporate that concept into our ingredient selection.

Yellow onion ring, green onions, and red onion. One big happy onion family!

In Family Style 2, we’re leaning more into ingredient varieties. Onions actually make a perfect case study. We’ve added red onions and green onions in addition to our original yellow onions. These "varieties" of onions all look very similar and are often used in very similar recipes interchangeably; this allows us to break up the pattern of recipe recognition that we noticed players in the first game become experts in. This wrinkle complicates communication too. It forces players to add an extra piece of identifying information when calling out for an onion they need. A strong ingredient for our ingredient set would have some varieties to mix things up, and we have a few of them!

PARAMETER 3 - NOVELTY

This might be my personal favorite parameter, but novelty is definitely a fun one. This describes an ingredient that might not be super well-known or familiar to a group of friends playing the game. These novel ingredients are what inspire the question mentioned early on, “Pass me the- uh, the uh.. Purple round thing?!” which is a fantastic injection of chaos in a potentially already chaotic round of gameplay. A player desperately needing an ingredient for a rapidly depleting plate, but they just… don’t know what it is they need!

BEAN SPROUTS!?

For example, we’ve added bean sprouts, a relatively unknown ingredient to some groups of players but obviously very well-known and adored by others. It’s been an absolute joy watching playtesters attempt to describe bean sprouts to their teammates or, conversely, watching a playtester who knows what it is ask for the ingredient amongst a group who has no idea! Novelty is a fun parameter that not only adds communication complexity, but also helps introduce brand new foods to players- which is super cool!

GOOD INGREDIENTS!

Leveraging recognizability, varieties, and novelty, we can measure the value of adding an ingredient to our set. This framework has helped us decide our ingredient set for launch along with hundreds of recipes that will play into these parameters to twist and complicate communication for many player groups. We’re super excited to hear people shout for those “skinny white things with a yellow nub” all over the world!

Are there any ingredients you want to see added? Let us know!