Cooking Diary: A Six-Year Recipe for Success

MYTONIA, the developer behind the megahit time-management game Cooking Diary, is celebrating six years of delicious gameplay. Whether you're a fellow developer seeking inspiration or a player curious about the game's creation, this recipe reveals the key ingredients and steps to its enduring success.

Ingredients:

• 431 story episodes
• 38 hero characters
• 8,969 elements
• 905,481 guilds
• A generous helping of events and contests
• A dash of humor
• Grandpa Grey's secret ingredient

Cooking Instructions:

Step 1: Crafting the Lore

Begin by developing a captivating plot filled with humor and unexpected twists. Introduce a diverse cast of colorful characters to bring the story to life. Structure the narrative around restaurants and districts, starting with your grandfather Leonard's Burger Joint. Expand gradually to include locations like Colafornia, Schnitzeldorf, and Sushijima. Cooking Diary boasts 160 unique restaurants across 27 districts, ensuring a steady stream of engaging guests.

Step 2: Customization Extravaganza

Add a vast array of customization options, including over 8,000 items. This includes 1,776 outfits, 88 sets of facial features, 440 hairstyles, and over 6,500 decorative items for player homes and restaurants. For pet lovers, there are pets and 200 clothing items to customize them.

Step 3: The Art of In-Game Events

Enhance the gameplay with a variety of engaging tasks and events. Leverage sharp analytics to complement creative game design with precise data-driven decisions. The key is to create diverse yet complementary events, each enjoyable individually and collectively. August, for instance, featured nine simultaneous events, from "Culinary Experiments" to "Sugar Rush," showcasing this layered approach.

Step 4: Building a Thriving Guild Community

Cooking Diary boasts over 905,000 guilds—a testament to its strong community aspect. Introduce guild events and tasks gradually, ensuring a well-integrated experience. Avoid overlapping events to maximize participation and engagement.

Step 5: Learning from Successes and Setbacks

Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities. The Cooking Diary team learned valuable lessons from their initial pet introduction in 2019. Initially, offering free common pets and paid rare ones proved ineffective. By making pets unlockable through the "Path to Glory" event, they saw a 42% revenue increase and boosted player satisfaction.

Step 6: Mastering Presentation and Marketing

With a vast casual games market across various app stores, a strong marketing strategy is crucial. Cooking Diary leverages social media effectively, runs contests, hosts activities, and stays abreast of industry trends. Successful collaborations, such as the Stranger Things and YouTube partnerships, further enhanced the game's reach and appeal.

Step 7: Continuous Innovation

Maintaining success requires ongoing innovation. Cooking Diary's six-year reign is a testament to its commitment to adding new content, experimenting with presentation, and refining gameplay mechanics. From event calendar adjustments to gameplay balancing, the game constantly evolves.

Step 8: The Secret Ingredient: Passion

Grandpa Grey's secret ingredient? Passion. A successful game stems from genuine love for the craft.

Download Cooking Diary on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Microsoft Store, and AppGallery.