6 Years of Cooking Diary: A Recipe for Success

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 secrets behind its enduring success.

Ingredients:

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

Cooking Instructions:

Step 1: Crafting the Lore

Begin by crafting a captivating plot filled with humor and unexpected twists. Populate your world with a diverse cast of colorful characters. Divide the storyline into restaurants and districts, starting with your grandfather Leonard's Burger Joint. Gradually expand to locations like Colafornia, Schnitzeldorf, and Sushijima. Cooking Diary boasts 160 unique restaurants across 27 districts, ensuring a steady stream of delightful guests.

Step 2: Customization Extravaganza

Lay the groundwork with your established lore and then add over 8,000 items, including 1,776 outfits, 88 sets of facial features, 440 hairstyles, and over 6,500 decorative items for homes and restaurants. For the pet lovers, include customizable pets and 200 clothing items to dress them up.

Step 3: The Art of In-Game Events

Enhance the experience with engaging tasks and events. Leverage powerful analytics to complement creative game design. The key is to create diverse yet complementary event layers, ensuring each event is enjoyable on its own and in combination with others. August, for example, featured nine concurrent events, from Culinary Experiments to Sugar Rush, demonstrating this layered approach.

Step 4: Building a Thriving Guild Community

Cooking Diary boasts over 905,000 guilds. Introduce guild events and tasks gradually and strategically, ensuring they don't clash with other time-consuming activities. Well-timed events attract more players and boost engagement.

Step 5: Learning from Setbacks

Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities. The Cooking Diary team learned from the initial misstep of introducing pets in 2019. By making pets unlockable through the Path to Glory event, they saw a 42% revenue increase.

Step 6: Strategic Presentation

The casual games market is competitive. Stand out by utilizing social media effectively, crafting creative marketing campaigns, running contests, and staying ahead of trends. Cooking Diary’s strong social media presence (Instagram, Facebook, X) exemplifies this. Strategic collaborations, such as the partnership with Netflix's Stranger Things and YouTube's Path to Glory event, further amplify reach and engagement.

Step 7: Continuous Innovation

Maintaining success requires constant innovation. Cooking Diary's six-year reign is a testament to its commitment to adding new content, experimenting with presentation, and refining gameplay mechanics.

Step 8: Grandpa Grey's Secret Ingredient

The most crucial ingredient is passion. Creating a successful game requires genuine love for the craft.

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