Off The Menu

We've all gotta eat.

A sad, silly cooking game about feeding anything to anybody. 

Created for the Playful.ai Merge Fun jam. Recipient of the Excellence Award (2nd/3rd place.)

Theme

Cooking in this game is just merging two items together. Broccoli + knife = a chopped-up slaw. Egg + skillet = sunny-side-up. Skillet + knife... who knows?

• I really mean it -- you can merge just about anything, and something will come out the other side.
• This "system" is powered by an LLM. You can expect silly, pedantic, and not-quite-human results. It's all part of the fun.

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AI Disclaimer

This project was made for an AI-focused jam. It was a fascinating few days leaning hard on the frontier of generative models. As a game developer by trade, I consider it my responsibility to retain awareness of these technologies' increasing capabilities and persistent shortcomings, both of which are profound. 

This experimental game kinda goes all-in on AI.

• Mechanics: cooking works like the brilliant Infinite Craft. New combinations generate a description (Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) and image (F.LUX 1 Schnell) on the fly.
• Images: F.LUX 1 Schnell (both in-game and pre-rendered); a bit of Gemini 2.0 Flash multimodal, a bit of Imagen 4. Edited quite heavily in Affinity Designer.
  • Getting diffusion models to produce independently coherent output becomes easier each day. Self-consistent output remains a challenge.
• Text: I wrote it, save for the generated food names and qualities.
  
• Music: I made it. (Ableton Live)
• Sounds: Either I made it, or it's from a public-domain sound pack.
• Code: I wrote some of it; the rest is pretty much all GPT-5 via Windsurf.

Were I to extend this game, I would prioritize replacing all the art with hand-drawn creations a la The Roottrees Are Dead. A story (if you can call it that) about something as personal as cooking someone a meal demands that the minds behind it be just as human.